Meters and Downtime Tracking
Recording usage readings and tracking when equipment is out of service.
Two optional tracking features can be turned on per equipment type: meters and downtime.
Meters
A meter records a usage reading over time — like an odometer or a run-hours counter. Readings can be entered directly, or recorded automatically as part of an Equipment Log entry when work is done. FMX always shows the latest reading, whichever source it came from most recently.
Meters are what make meter-based Work Tasks possible — a task set to trigger "every 500 hours" is watching a meter on the equipment it's assigned to.
Downtime tracking
If your organization tracks downtime for a given equipment type, each piece of that equipment has a status of Up or Down (in addition to Retired or Deleted, which override both). A downtime event has a start time and, once resolved, an end time — while it's open, the equipment shows as Down.
Downtime metrics
Once downtime tracking is turned on for a piece of equipment, FMX calculates:
- Total Downtime — the combined duration of all closed downtime events.
- Total Uptime — time since tracking started, minus total downtime.
- Mean Time Between Failure — average uptime per downtime event, a common reliability measure.
A worked example
An air handling unit has downtime tracking enabled. When it fails, a downtime event is started, putting it in Down status. A technician resolves the issue three hours later and ends the event. That three-hour gap counts toward the unit's total downtime, and if this is its second failure since tracking began, FMX can now show a mean time between failures based on those two events.