According to the 2015 Edition of NFPA 70E 130.2(A)(4), part of defining "Normal Operation" of electric equipment requires five conditions must be satisfied. Two of these conditions are:

The equipment is properly installed.
The equipment is properly maintained.

If a qualified outside electrical contractor is performing electrical work at the job site, do you think these two conditions might be difficult for them to assess?

Here is the Question:

Could an outside contractor make the determination whether equipment is properly installed / maintained?
Yes
No
It depends/Unsure

You bring up a good point. I would think generally the answer is no - how would a contractor know these conditions? The normal operation questions can be difficult enough for the facility owner to answer but for a contractor? I'm not sure how they would know.

The exception would be if a company has used the same company / contractor for a very long time and they basically act as the owner's agent/representative.

I think this is another case of good intentions but it's not always applicable. I'm not even sure in older facilities how you could honestly state the equipment has been properly maintained. Maybe during your time but what about the decades before. It's a tough call.

I think one way of handling this is to place a sticker on the equipment similar to a relay calibration sticker that identifies the date when the preventive maintenance was performed and when the next one is due. No sticker means not maintained.

Seems like properly installed=follows NEC. Generally this is possible to determine although sometimes AIC can be challenging especially if its borderline.

Properly maintained? Better question...can anyone define it?

I would say that it seems like whether or not is has been properly maintained can only be determined in a postmortem inspection, provided anything remains of the device, after a failure.

The concept behind modern "maintenance" theory is that everything will eventually fail if nothing is done about it. We first need to decide...if it fails, does anyone care? If the answer is no, then we run to failure. For example with a car one of the routine maintenance items is changing the oil, oil filter, and cleaning or changing the air filter. But do you check the pressure and/or recharge the refrigerant in the HVAC? Almost everyone simply runs it until it doesn't cool any more because it's a convenience item. Even where I live in the South even if not having air conditioning can get pretty uncomfortable in the summer, it's not a critical item.

The next problem is that of hidden failures. For example when a breaker is seized up or the trip unit has failed, is there any external indication that the breaker is no longer functioning prior to being called into service when it will no longer trip? Chances are that the answer is no, so the only way to detect these hidden failures is by doing some sort of test on the equipment.

A further concept is the P-F curve. The idea is that we can perform some sort of maintenance whether it is preventative such as changing oil or predictive such as testing breakers, prior to a failure becoming noticeable. Detected failures trigger corrective maintenance which restores the equipment back to full function. Although this is a game of probabilities in the end, the goal would be to have 100% detection of all failures of critical equipment so that equipment never fails while in service, or at least that we can reduce the probability of this happening down to an acceptable minimum.

Further, not all makes and models of equipment fails with the exact same rate or likelihood and the "predictive power" of the various PM's varies quite a bit, as does the probability of detecting a failure (not alll predictive maintenance is successful). So somewhere along the line we have to pick and choose what tests are required for critical equipment (those that are not simply run to failure) and over time as data accumulates, we adjust the frequency of inspection.

All of this is documented in the various maintenance standards available although obviously there is so much that is truly unknown that there is quite a bit of leeway in determining what it means to have a "proper maintenance" program. One of the big factors is that at least with mechanical equipment, environmental factors account for somewhere around 60% of the variability in failure rates which means that maintenance frequencies will be 100% site specific. With electrical equipment the situation is somewhat better in general but environmental factors still play a huge role. And the information that is out there is often poor or lacking. For instance IEEE 493 contains data that was analyzed in a NETA white paper that stated that roughly 10% of breakers fail in the first year after performing a PM, roughly 10% the second year, and then 80% during year 3+. The conclusion that was stated was that 80% of breakers tend to fail if they are not inspected at least every 24 months! What the data did not show (because it doesn't exist) is whether all of those failures occurred in year 3 or if they occurred in year 10. My gut feeling from experience is that lubricant hardening causes a lot of failures SOMEWHERE in the neighborhood of 3-6 years. Switching to a nonhardening lubricant (e.g. fluoropolymer based grease) eliminates this failure mode. But none of this is mentioned in the NETA article because it is self serving for an organization based on companies selling electrical equipment servicing.

Thus I believe that in the case of grease hardening that there is probably a "correct" PM frequency that works across the board which suggests that a specific time frame should be used for breakers. Similarly the number of cycles that contact tips are subjected to should define a PM frequency although that may be very frequent for instance with overhead cranes using multi-speed motor contactors which can wear out in weeks and very infrequent with distribution-level circuit breakers. Again, these are all mechanical systems.

When however it comes to everything that is more or less "solid state", this approach falls down. The vast majority of electrical failures as documented by Nolan and Heap, and which has been repeated in various industries, shows that electrical equipment failures are for the most part purely random and show no specific pattern of failure rates. Thus one can truly decide what level of failures is acceptable and adjust the PM frequency accordingly. In this case, there is no point at which equipment is "worn out" because it doesn't wear out with any particular pattern. Failures simply occur randomly. And doing a total overhaul or replacement of old parts does not reduce the failure rate unlike with mechanical equipment such as contact tips or lubricating or cooling fluids.

Anyways...there has been a lot written about this. To me the term "properly maintained" means that a PM program has been established that does PM's to detect hidden failures and performs preventative maintenance on critical equipment. As an example I think it would be acceptable to suggest that arcing faults caused by equipment failure which could cause an arc flash would be considered critical equipment or at least a critical failure mode. We can establish a comparable injury rate by comparing arc flash injuries to injury rates from comparable hazards in the work place to establish a target failure rate which makes electrical hazards no more likely than other similar types of injuries. Then we can look at equipment failure rates and establish a maximum allowable arcing fault failure rate for the equipment and thus we can establish a reasonable PM frequency which maintains the failure rate at or below the allowable failure rate. If preventative maintenance procedures have already been established then the residual failure rate will be purely random and thus by looking at available average failure rates for the equipment, the PM frequency can be calculated very easily.

And with all that being said, documentation should follow that:
1. A risk assessment has been done.
2. PM frequencies and procedures for equipment have been established supporting the risk assessment.
3. Work order histories and field inspections show that PM's are being done with the correct frequency and procedures are being followed.
4. Evidence that when assessments indicate problems with work done in the first two steps that this is corrected...basically that the system is working.

It is definitely possible to audit these sorts of things. The audit is not much different from similar audits done to establish the effectiveness of procedures such as OSHA PSM (Process Safety Management) for companies handling "highly hazardous chemicals", or OSHA/MSHA audits, or insurance industry audits, Sarbanes-Oxley audits, or even ISO 9000 audits.

And all that being said, NFPA 70B and IEEE Yellow book both cover the highlights of what an effective electrical maintenance program should include. And given some knowledge about what it should or does include, an outside contractor can easily determine whether or not a company has an effective maintenance program just as easily as most host companies spend an equal amount of time determining whether or not a potential service contractor has an effective safety program and effective service procedures.

What I find troubling with 70B and IEEE Yellow book though is that these are very general reliability-based maintenance programs. They are not specifically focused on safety, so there is no underlying risk assessment associated with them. A lot of what those programs suggest is important for reliability reasons has very little to do with safety. This is where a more rigorous standard from 70E could go a long ways towards getting rid of the ambiguity associated with "properly maintained".

Oh Boy, This is a big problem. A long time ago on a facility I will not name, my company was called in for an annual maintenance. A very excellent tasting Laboratory was hired. This was a different firm then the one used a year before. We immediately noted red tags on a lot of places on the equipment. The person in charge of the new testing, told me his competitor was pretty good as all of the retagged items still had identical problems to what was noted on the tags.

Then there was the pump station, where a main breaker, a feeder and a branch circuit breaker failed to trip when tested, The branch circuit was tagged out. A heate, it supplied, showed signs of damage. In the middle of a night, telemetry showed the station had shut down and the power company was called. After 2 sets of power company fuses were replaced and promptly blew out the power company said that there was a major problem in the station, An electrician ion was called and found the damage heater and tagged it out. I believe moisture was the culprit, and while the breakers would open manually, they would not trip for a fault. We had to replace several breakers.

If you do not check them, how do you Know they will trip?. Also the power company fuses may save you, but do you rally want to depend on them.