What does predictive maintenance actually mean for a hotel?
Maintaining an asset on evidence of its condition rather than on a calendar. The US DOE’s FEMP guidance puts it at 8–12% cheaper than preventive and more than 30–40% cheaper than running to failure — and its surveys find most facilities are still reactive.
The numbers, and why they are still unclaimed
The Department of Energy has published this for years: a predictive programme runs 8–12% below a calendar-driven preventive one, and 30–40% or more below run-to-failure. The same guidance reports that most facilities remain predominantly reactive.
The savings are not unclaimed because they are unknown. They are unclaimed because reactive maintenance funds itself: emergencies eat the budget, so the preventive work slips, so there are more emergencies. It is a stable equilibrium, and it will hold for as long as you let it.
What it looks like in practice, on real hotel plant
Not sensors on everything. Start with what the plant already tells you. Runtime hours on chillers and pumps. Amp draw trending up on a motor. Delta-T across a coil drifting. Filter differential pressure. Vibration on the big rotating equipment.
Each of those is a condition signal that exists whether or not you read it — and each one turns a calendar PM into a decision based on the machine’s actual state rather than on the month.
The realistic entry point
Do not attempt the whole estate. Take the assets where a failure is expensive and guest-visible — chillers, boilers, lifts, the main pumps — and instrument those. The corridor extract fan can go on running to failure; that is a legitimate strategy for an asset nobody notices.
And the prerequisite for any of it is a maintenance history worth reading, which means failure codes on closure rather than free text. “Fixed it” cannot be trended. Nothing predictive is possible on top of a record that does not say what broke.
In the guides
Terms
References
- US DOE Federal Energy Management Program — O&M Best Practices Guide: predictive vs preventive vs reactive savings; share of facilities still predominantly reactive
Zepth is the construction project delivery platform — it runs construction, procurement and asset management on one record, and does the work: reading the drawings, reviewing the submittals, matching the invoices and flagging the risks, with a human sign-off on anything consequential.
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