Clients and Friends,
There have been several occasions over the past week in which both I and our servicemen have had to refer to the electrical drawings at our customers’ buildings. The reasons included:

• Locating a switch to shut down elevator service in order to repair a faulty switch.
• Finding a circuit for (airplane) obstruction lights on the roof.
• Locating the circuits to deal with an intermittent short circuit

When builders transfer a property to its new owner, they typically include drawings, manuals related to various fixtures, and other forms of documentation concerning the building’s operations. Whereas builders used to provide this information in the form of rolled paper blueprints, today they typically hand over the relevant drawings and specifications on a compact disc. In either case, these documents are important and should be treated as such.

Multi-storey condominiums house complex electrical systems. Electrical drawings and blueprints are key components of proper, timely and safe service. Most people would be amazed to know how often these documents rest unattended in a subbasement storage room. A new condominium manager might not even know where to find them!

Since these CDs or papers may provide the only reliable method of responding to a power outage or other emergency, the inability to locate electrical drawings and blueprints can cause significant delays to the provision of service. Property managers would do well to develop a series of written procedures for the preservation and storage of these important documents.