What is something people should know when looking for the ideal UPS?

“Reliability.”

In your opinion, what sets our Field Service team apart?

"[Our] ability to work well independently, to service our local customers, and work efficiently together on large projects.

We all work in our own area, or we have our own area of responsibility or where we work out of (the city that we work out of). A lot of our work is independent work, and we have to be efficient at the get-go. Starting our job here at MEPPI as a service tech is to be able to work independently - to do all the work independently.

You have a lot of guys who can work efficiently on their own, doing their things to be able to be responsible for their area, be responsible for their customers. And then on the flip side, put all those minds together when it comes to a larger project where we need more than one tech.

We have a lot of these larger projects nationally and a lot of times, there are a lot of units or just a lot of work that needs to be done. So we have to put all these techs together, and we can literally bring in all sorts of techs from different areas. And what I’ve noticed is we work really well and efficiently together because they’ve all got the background of knowing what to do independently.

We are, as service technicians who see a wide range of different environments, very adaptable to those working environments.” 

What advice would you give to a facility manager?

“Stay on top of the maintenance schedule.

Maintenance doesn’t automatically come with the UPS system. Sometimes they purchase it as an addition. Sometimes they buy a maintenance contract afterwards - however they work it out with Sales. We always recommend to our customers when they first get a UPS system [to] not to skip out on annual maintenance.

When we look at battery maintenance, we want to make sure we analyze all their batteries and then trend that data over time to see if we can find any batteries that may fail early or that need replaced or that need some attention. So we can predict that instead of them being surprised during an outage when they need the batteries.

On the UPS side, just having maintenance yearly can make sure that it operates properly. A lot of times, a UPS just sits there throughout the whole year and it only changes operation [when] there’s something that happens electrically in the building - that’s usually an unexpected time. For annual maintenance, we test out the system’s functionality to make sure that that system is ready during an unexpected time - that it keeps their load protected.

The main point of that is to keep on top of maintenance. Even though we have a reliable system, have annual maintenance [and] we always recommend that they get a maintenance contract.”

Want to establish regularly scheduled maintenance visits? Contact us!

What is something that people may find surprising or interesting about working in critical power?

“No two data centers are alike because electrical designs are always different.

When you go inside [and] you see the different equipment or how it’s configured between a UPS and their electrical, there could be several components inside a data center or an electrical room. But it’s not configured the same way in any two places because obviously each build has its own electrical engineer that designs that space, so we [the service techs] have to be adaptable.

We can’t always assume that what’s before the UPS and what’s after the UPS is going to be the same for every site. So even though our UPS functions exactly the same way anywhere we go - it’s always going to support the load with batteries or make sure it’s clean power coming out - what’s before or what’s after it is always different no matter where you go.

It can vary by the person that designs it, the space, the limitations of the building that they’re working in or working out of, their budget, what they’re supporting, what their customer - say the end user - is expecting.

For data centers and colocation, it can be based on their customers (who fills their space, what they need as far as electrical requirements for their systems). [It] just varies by everything."

What is something you are passionate about outside of work?

“Traveling to other countries.”

What are some of the countries you’ve been to? What are some of your favorites?

“I’ve been to a lot of places. Like more recently - Tunisia, Iceland, Sri Lanka, Poland, South Africa. I like Norway… Spain. It’d probably be Portugal, Iceland, and Oman [at the] top of my list so far. It’s been about 10 years since I’ve really started travelling the world.”

What is the best advice you have ever received, personally or professionally?

"Take a step back and look at the whole situation before tackling a specific problem.”