Winter maintenance efforts mean year-round reliability.

Reliability - the quality of being trustworthy or of performing consistently well

Consumer-members have come to know and expect the reliability that Cass County Electric Cooperative provides. Look at all the moving pieces it takes to deliver electricity to heat your home, charge your phone, and enjoy life’s technology. This complex system is bound to breakdothinwn or cause issues at some point, which is why at Cass County Electric Cooperative, we focus on maintaining our equipment. Our preventive maintenance is a major part of providing you with reliable power.

One of our goals is to prevent outages from ever occurring. To accomplish this goal, every two years, the crews inspect our entire system. It starts with concentrating on equipment inspections from January to March, which ultimately is a year-long process. When the crews are inspecting lines, they look for anything out of the ordinary, something that is not up to spec or would not pass industry standards. When an issue is identified, the crew will note it in a GIS (geographic information system) software, enabling the crew to communicate information in real-time back to the office and other crews.

Frequent maintenance fixes include updating yard poles with new technology to provide safeguards for animals, inspecting switches (underground lines), and conducting vegetation management (clearing trees or brush near power lines).

Technology has drastically improved our inspection process. Not every pole or piece of equipment is easily accessible, so with the use of a drone, snowmobile, UTV with tracks, or a Prinoth, our crews can reach those areas and safely maintain the lines. There is no upfront glory by maintaining our equipment, but it’s because of the behind-the-scenes work that we can continue to provide our consumer-members with the reliable power they expect from their cooperative.