The pre-winter inspection cycle.

What "shoulder season" means here

Shoulder season is the four to six weeks between the last hard sugar-run frosts going to ground and the first sustained snow. In our service area that's roughly the second week of October through the third week of November. The work calendar is unusually open: dairy is in steady-state milking, sugar is in deep wood-cutting, summer construction has slowed, and winter emergencies haven't started.

So we use the window for inspection. Every farm we did meaningful work on five years prior gets a one-day inspection visit at no charge to the customer; we charge only if we find something needing actual work, and we explicitly tell the customer that's the deal before we come out. The visit is a maintenance protocol, not a sales call.

What we check, in order

1. Service entrance. Re-torque the meter-and-main lugs (utility-side and customer-side) per copper-aluminum joint guidance. Check for any sign of moisture infiltration on the riser conduit. Inspect the EPDM sleeve we installed at install if the climate has been hard on it.
2. Type-1 SPD condition. Most modern SPDs have a green/red status indicator. We check the indicator, log the date of any color change, and replace any unit reading red or unclear. The 2023-cohort of Eaton SPDs we installed in J-01 service upgrades has held up uniformly well; the 2018-cohort had a 14% replacement rate by year 5 because the early units were Type-2 only and we've upgraded those to Type-1.
3. Equipotential plane re-bond verification. On dairy farms (J-02), step-potential measured at every cow stand. Threshold < 0.3 V AC; corrected if drifted. See J-02 page for the schedule.
4. NFPA 780 lightning protection condition. On farms with our LPS work, every air terminal, every bond, every down-conductor inspected. Replacement of any conductor that has corrosion past the polish layer; verification that no bonding has been disturbed by other work in the past year.
5. Microhydro intake screen condition. On J-05 customers, we check the Coanda screen for sediment lock-up and the penstock for any visible movement (heaving, settling).
6. Sugarhouse heat-trace contactor verification. On J-03 customers, we verify the heat-trace contactor still drops out at 35°F. Reset thermostats are a common cause of unnecessary winter electrical load.
7. Panel inspection. Open every panel. Look for: insect intrusion (yellow-jackets like warm panels in fall), mouse activity (chewed insulation; uncommon but possible), rodent fecal deposits as evidence of activity, hot spots on the breakers via thermal imaging.

What we typically find

From October 2024's cycle, on 47 farms inspected, summarized:

Finding	Count	Notes
Equipotential bus drift > 0.3 V	11	All on dairy farms; all corrected on the visit.
SPD red/replacement needed	7	5 from August lightning event; 2 cumulative.
Insect activity in main panel	4	Two yellow-jackets, two mud daubers. Cleaned, no damage.
Mouse activity	1	One penetration into a sub-panel via cable hole; one section of NM-B insulation gnawed; replaced.
Hot-spot identified by IR	3	Two re-torque corrections; one breaker replaced.
Heat-trace mis-set	3	Two thermostats had been bypassed by previous service; reverted.
LPS conductor corrosion	2	Both replaced.
Found a 1923 K&T splice we missed in 2019	1	That was embarrassing. Repaired at no charge to customer.

About 30% of inspection visits result in a finding requiring follow-up work. The follow-up work pays for itself in customer relationships; we have, in twelve years, lost zero customers we serviced under this protocol.

Why we wrote this

Because most of what fails in farm electrical fails between the inspection and the failure. Bonding does not announce itself when it degrades; SPDs do not announce themselves when they sacrifice; lightning protection does not announce itself when a single down-conductor corrodes through. Annual inspection is the only practice we know of that catches drift in time.

If you're a customer of ours and we did meaningful work on your farm five or more years ago and we have not yet been out for an inspection, please call. The rotation is roughly chronological by install date but we are not perfect; the binder above the dispatch desk is the source of truth and it can be wrong.