Substation maintenance at Hospital Universitario Nacional de Colombia

A tertiary-care hospital with a large transformer fleet in permanent service. The challenge was not technical but one of continuity: working on five substations of very different capacities, plus the low-voltage switchboards, without leaving any critical area without power at any point. On top of that came the remedial work needed for the installation to be recertified under RETIE.

Maintaining one substation is well-understood work. Maintaining five, ranging from 112.5 to 1000 kVA and feeding different clinical areas, is a sequencing problem. Every unit taken out temporarily leaves a set of circuits without backup, and you have to know in advance which ones they are and what happens to them while the work lasts.

That is why the longest part of a project like this is not the execution but the survey that precedes it: understanding what each transformer feeds, which switchboards depend on it and which parts of the hospital are affected. Only with that map can you build a schedule the hospital's maintenance team can approve without clinical risk.