It is said that the sole purpose of a propeller on an aircraft is to cool the pilot. If you don’t believe that, let it stop turning and watch the pilot start sweating.
The same could be said for the fans and A/C units on your cabinets and Rexroth Indramat drives and motors. You might not know it yet, but you might should be sweating. As we come into summer, it is about the time every year that we start seeing more thermal failures show up. A fan on a drive stops in the middle of winter, the drive may keep going (although it will start aging quicker). Hit the first 80 degree day and it may decide that it is time to retire.
Fan operation checks
While fan operation checks are unpopular, even with preventative maintenance guys, they don’t take long. Just run a mirror on a stick (preferably a non‐conductive stick) under the drive and power supply units. The fans are usually centered front to back and can be seen turning (or not). If your fan isn’t turning, get some air moving across the drive immediately, better yet, swap it out for a spare, and get a fan ordered (it is the ONLY internal drive component Rexroth sells).
A/C
Cabinet A/C units are probably the single best control life extension you can put on a cabinet. Electronics of all sorts love to be in cool, humidity controlled environments. However, checking to see if they are working (and if the doors are kept closed) is something that should happen weekly. We recently had a client with a very expensive A/C unit, which had been installed the previous year on a cabinet.
Unfortunately, when we got there, the doors were open (and had been for some time), the A/C unit was inoperable from all the dust it had sucked in over the last year, and several of the drives were in pretty bad shape. Conversations that ensued were not pleasant.
One other thing to watch on A/C units is that they are drained properly. We have had several clients that have had units where the condensate drains clogged. Once the pan filled up, the unit starts spitting water out the blower duct. If that happens to be pointed toward the controls, bad things can happen quickly.
If you just have cabinet blowers, check and make sure the filters are changed (you have filters,right?). But consider putting a Cabinet A/C unit on instead. They are relatively cheap, and can cut downtime over the long haul. We are here when you need to get up quick from a failure, but we want that failure to be as far down the road as possible.