Meters and Preventive Maintenance

Meters record usage — hours run, miles driven, copies produced, cycles completed. They drive usage-based maintenance and, where relevant, usage-based depreciation.

Rollover is handled

Meters wrap. A five-digit hour meter goes from 99999 to 0, and a naive system reads that as negative usage of 99999 hours. Rollover is handled explicitly, so a wrapped reading is interpreted as continued usage rather than as an impossible correction.

You do not need to do anything for this beyond recording readings honestly, including the one after the wrap.

Recording readings

Readings are dated observations, not a current value that gets overwritten. Keeping the history is what lets you see usage rate over time, which is what makes a usage-based schedule predictable rather than reactive.

Record readings at a regular cadence. Sporadic readings make the interval between services a guess.

Preventive maintenance

A maintenance schedule says what should be done and how often, in one of two ways:

• By elapsed time — every six months, regardless of use. Right for things that degrade whether used or not, and for statutory inspections.
• By usage — every 500 hours or 10,000 miles. Right for wear-driven servicing.

Many assets need both, whichever falls first. A vehicle serviced every 10,000 miles or twelve months should not go three years because it was little used.

Due and overdue

The schedule combined with readings is what produces a due list. Review it as a forward plan, not as an overdue report — the point of preventive maintenance is to act before failure, and a list you only look at when something breaks is a maintenance log rather than a schedule.

Connect maintenance to time and stock

Where maintenance is carried out in-house, book time against the asset and issue parts from stock against the same job. That gives you the real cost of ownership, which is the figure that informs whether to keep repairing or replace.