How To Navigate the NFPA 70B | Standard for Electrical Equipment Maintenance

Have you ever flipped through an unfamiliar technical standard and felt a bit lost in all the details?  Many of us have been there. These comprehensive standards are absolutely essential for electrical safety and equipment reliability, but let’s be honest —they can be a bit overwhelming at first glance.

That’s one reason why HeatSpring co-instructor Brian Mehalic created the NFPA 70B: A New Standard for Electrical Equipment Maintenance course. Because sometimes having an experienced guide walk alongside you through the technical details makes all the difference between feeling lost and feeling confident.

In this clip, you’ll get a quick tour of how this important standard is organized. Here, Brian breaks down this document into manageable pieces so you can navigate it with ease—whether you’re dealing with PV systems, battery energy storage, or something else. 

Let’s jump in!

Transcript below.

 As our last bit of introductory material here, let’s take a look at how the document itself is laid out. Chapters 1-10 in NFPA 70B apply to all equipment. These requirements include things like administration, publications that are referenced, definitions, and general requirements. It gets into personnel safety, single-line diagrams, the fundamental tests, field testing and test methods, maintenance intervals, and then finally hazardous or classified locations and electrical equipment that may be in them. We’re going to be diving more deeply into many of these chapters in the rest of the course. 

Chapters 11-38 detail specific requirements for specific equipment, so these are requirements for specific equipment. I’m not going to read these all off to you. You can go ahead and take a look at the list here.

It’s broken down into things like transformers, switchboard, and switch gears, breakers and fuses, different types of wiring methods, lighting systems, wiring devices. 

Particular interest to us may be things like…

Battery Energy Storage Systems in Chapter 32. 

EV Power Transfer Systems and Equipment – Chapter 33.

PV Systems – Chapter 30

And Wind Power Electric Systems – Chapter 31.

Of course, a lot of our large scale and C&I systems are going to include parts and pieces that I often call regular electrical equipment. All of these other parts and pieces that are called out in these specific chapters. So yes, we’re going to look to the PV chapter and the storage chapter for specific guidance on those parts of the system that are unique to those kinds of systems, but we’ve got to realize all along that, hey, we’re going to have transformers. We’re going to have switchboards. We’re going to have various kinds of wiring systems, and those likely have a chapter of their own as well. 

Finally, the back of the book has the annexes in it. There’s a lot of good stuff in here: explanatory material, symbols and diagrams, suggestions for an inspection, walkthrough checklist, and all kinds of other information that can be very helpful. Some of it’s very specific, some of it’s more general in nature. 

Lastly, when we’re navigating the document, there’s going to be some pointers in there that can be really helpful if you understand what they mean.

First off, if we have asterisks, those are going to point to explanatory information in Annex A. Here’s an example, 8.3* Testing Category Types. There’s more information on this in the explanatory Annex A. 

[Brackets] refer to other NFPA documents, so NFPA 70E, for instance. You will get the addition date in there as well.

Then finally, anything in parentheses means (reserved). These are placeholders for future content that’ll probably make their way into the standard in a coming edition, but it’s not in there now.