PREVENTATIVE MAINTENANCE 101 FOR CAMPGROUND AND RV PARK OPERATORS
Many of your guests don't realize that there's a lot more than just having a maintenance person cutting the grass and helping them park an RV on their site. Maintenance is the process of maintaining or preserving equipment, sites, or other assets in working and safe order.
There are four types of maintenance an operator should consider in their property operations:
- Corrective-Reactive - which is restoring something that breaks or stops working during normal operations.
- Preventative - scheduled maintenance that reduces the risk of equipment or asset breakdown or failure and improves the performance of equipment.
- Risk based-Capital Improvement Program (CapEx) – this involves assessing the asset life and implementing an appropriate program to acquire or upgrade physical assets such as buildings or major equipment.
- Condition-based or Predictive – this is the detection of deteriorating equipment or structures based on regular checks.
Most operators are familiar with corrective or reactive measures, (which is when items stop functioning or equipment breakdown), but the good operator has a strong preventative schedule for routine maintenance of equipment and assets. The goal to fix them before they break and get ahead of stoppages rather than having to catchup with the reactive and corrective approach.
Developing a maintenance schedule helps the operator tackle the preventative and to some degree the predictive items. There are three key areas that drive the maintenance tasks needed to be undertaken:
- Manufacturers manuals with recommended maintenance points – also take note of the manufacturer recalls and announcements about deficiencies.
- Government regulation bodies and safety authorities who dictate what, when and how things should be tested and maintained, such as weekly water samples, annual electrical and propane certificate inspections etc.
- Personal, maintenance staff and professional contractor experience gained over time.
Preventative maintenance objectives can be stated as:
- Making sure you have the parts on hand when needed.
- Implementing regular maintenance and heading off performance degradation.
- Reducing downtime and the associated negative guest experience impact downstream.
- Seeking a problem free, safe, and secure service offering to the guest.
- Maintenance learning and betterment through training and certification.
To review the preventative template maintenance spreadsheet provided by Jamie Cox, BCLCA President as part of his presentation on Campground Maintenance at the Parksville Ideas Forum -
click here.
The maintenance spreadsheet has worksheets such as Full Maintenance List, Hardware and Utilities, Roads, Vehicles etc. for the various tasks needed to be undertaken by category, which includes frequency, who is responsible, tracking of the date completed and the dollars spent.
The preventative maintenance spreadsheet allows you to tackle maintenance over the full calendar year and therefore, is broken into annual, semi annual, monthly, weekly, and as needed (i.e. every 5,000 km or 100 hours of running time) tasks. It also helps identify the predictive life of items such as equipment and buildings.
Sources: Webinar Campground Maintenance February 2023, Chris Rhodes, Director of Operations, Eastern Resorts, Parkbridge. Preventative Maintenance Session BCLCA Ideas Forum November 2023 Parksville BC - Jamie Cox, General Manager, St Andrews by The Lake.
