On every vessel we attend we ask the same question: how many alarms are active right now, in normal operation? When the answer is a two-digit number, engine-room monitoring has already stopped working, whatever the certificate says.
How a system gets there
Nobody ever decided to leave forty standing alarms. It is the sum of small decisions, each reasonable at the time:
- A sensor failed, the replacement was delayed, the point was inhibited 'temporarily' three years ago.
- A machine was removed in a retrofit but its points were never deleted.
- A limit was set at the yard for operating conditions that no longer apply.
- An alarm activated in every heavy weather, so the limit was raised instead of adding a proper delay.
- A point has the correct limit but wrong calibration, and nobody ever compared it against the local gauge.
None of those decisions was unreasonable when it was made. Their sum is.
The real cost
The cost is not the nuisance. It is that the crew stops reading. When a system produces constant noise, the human response is to develop a filter — and that filter does not distinguish the forty-first alarm, the real one.
The second cost arrives after an incident. When the alarm log is requested for analysis, the time sequence that would have explained what happened is buried under standing points and is effectively unrecoverable.
The rehabilitation process
- Full export of the point list: every point, limit, delay, state, and whether it is inhibited.
- Physical verification of a sample: AMS reading against the local gauge, in operation. Calibration errors surface here.
- Deletion of points belonging to equipment that no longer exists — approved and documented.
- Restoration of inhibited points: sensor replacement, wiring repair, or a documented decision that the point is not required.
- Limits and delays reset against today's operating conditions, not the original ones.
- Prioritisation: split into critical, warning and status. Not everything is an alarm.
- Testing per point and per group, to a protocol.
How it stays clean
A clean-up lasts exactly as long as the discipline that follows it. Two practices are enough on most vessels: every inhibited point is recorded with a date and an owner and reviewed at each crew change; and every retrofit explicitly includes updating the point list in its scope of work.