Am I paying to much for service?

[Mojoseph]

I am new at my position which is electrical supervisor for a plant in the south. I have responsibility of maintenance of 480 volt and 5 kv circuit breakers. This is what I need to know. I just sent outa request for quotation to select vendors to provide rebuild services for a Westinghouse DS-416 circuit breaker, and retrofit with solid state device(digi-trip), and a GE AKR-4A-30 retrofit with solid state device, GE (MVT PLUS) I also requested a quote to refurbish a Westinghouse 50 DHP 250 and a GE AM 4.16-350-2H. The quotes I received were through the roof. Can anyone tell me the average cost of circuit breaker refurbishment and retro-fit. I just want to make sure my vendors are not taking advantage of inexperience.

Thank you

 

[oldfieldguy]

My former employer used to do a solid-state trip conversion for about a thousand bucks plus the cost of the trip unit kit +15%. That included thorough cleaning, inspection and testing.

I am suspicious of "refurbishment". Some less scrupulous shops disassemble, clean, repaint, replate, and put your breaker back together without checking parts that may be still working but are approaching wear limits.

You might also want to check into new replacement breakers. You may find that they are a reasonable alternative to your refurbishment plans.

old field guy

 

[DanDel]

Standard retrofit prices for C/Bs you describe, using after-market kits (Satin American, Joslin, Utility Relay, etc.) are typically around $3000. This is just for the reotrofit. Using the factory retrofit kits would be more $$$.
Any other repair, disassembly, and/or complete breakdown would be, obviously, even more $$$.

 

[jpankask]

Your vendors probably are taking advantage of you. A few years ago, we paid a vendor to teach our guys how to rebuild our GE AKR's because the rebuilds we got back from the vendors (even OEM), were substandard and very expensive. We sent six techs to the class and it cost about as much as rebuilding 6 breakers but they performed an actual rebuild of our breakers in the class. So for the cost of rebuilding about 6 breakers, we got 6 rebuilt breakers and now have been performing rebuilds in-house. The quality is way up, failures are way down and we are saving a lot of money in the long run. Of course we have a large population of AKR breakers. We still send our DS-416's to Westinghouse because we only have a few and it isn't worth the training cost. They actually do a pretty good job on the rebuilds.