A lease operator’s first month with a compressor callout log

Danny has run a route of 22 rented compressors in the Midland Basin for six years. He knows which units will go down in August and which ones will throw a fault every time it rains. What he did not have, until last month, was any of it written down.

His foreman handed him the free callout log and asked for one thing: three times on every callout.

The three times

1. When the unit went down. Not when you found it. When it stopped, from the panel or the SCADA history.
2. When the vendor's tech arrived on location.
3. When the unit was back online and holding.

Everything else (down hours, response time, repair time, runtime, the credit) comes from those three.

What the first month showed

By the end of the month Danny had logged 11 callouts. Three things jumped out that six years of memory had not:

• Two units accounted for 7 of the 11 callouts
• Every callout after 6 p.m. waited until morning for a tech
• The vendor's invoice listed 9 callouts, not 11

Habits that made it stick

• Log it from the truck, before you start troubleshooting
• If you do not know the exact time a unit went down, write your best estimate and mark it
• One row per callout, even when the same unit goes down twice in a day

It takes thirty seconds. The first time the vendor saw my sheet, he stopped arguing about hours.— Danny, our fictional lease operator

The spreadsheet does the arithmetic: down hours, runtime by unit and a monthly summary with the credit your guarantee says you are owed.