Who Uses Magnefy

Fault prediction applies wherever transformer reliability matters

Any organization that runs oil-filled distribution transformers and bears the cost of unplanned outages has a direct use case. The specifics differ by fleet size, regulatory environment, and operational structure.

Municipal and Co-op Utilities

Replace reactive dispatch with scheduled maintenance

Municipal electric utilities and rural electric cooperatives operate distribution transformer fleets where a single substation outage triggers regulatory reporting, customer notice requirements, and crew dispatch at premium hours. The transformer failure itself is rarely the largest cost item. The downstream cascades are.

Magnefy gives operations teams 3 to 6 weeks of advance notice. That window is enough to order parts from the supplier (not emergency overnight), schedule a maintenance crew during normal working hours, and notify regulators proactively rather than reactively.

A typical distribution fleet has 200-2,000 assets. Magnefy starts with the highest-risk subset and scales to the full fleet after the pilot period confirms detection performance on local equipment.

Engineer with tablet inspecting transformer equipment at an outdoor utility substation

$220K

Median cost per hour of unplanned industrial production downtime attributable to power supply failure, per DOE survey data.

COMMON INDUSTRIAL CONTEXTS

  • Cement and aggregate processing
  • Chemical and petrochemical facilities
  • Automotive and heavy manufacturing
  • Data centers and critical infrastructure
  • Port and logistics terminal operators

Industrial Facility Operators

Power reliability as a production constraint

Industrial facilities with continuous processes face a different calculus from utilities. A transformer failure does not just cut power to customers. It stops production, potentially scraps in-process work, and may trigger equipment protection shutdowns that take hours to restart.

For facilities running 24-hour operations, the maintenance window problem is also different. There may be one scheduled production shutdown per quarter. Magnefy's advance warning window is long enough to confirm a fault and schedule the repair into the next planned shutdown rather than forcing an emergency outage.

Facilities typically have between 3 and 50 distribution transformers at varying criticality. Magnefy can prioritize monitoring to the assets whose failure would most directly interrupt production, starting the ROI calculation where the exposure is highest.

Fleet Managers and Asset Owners

Fleet-level visibility across distributed assets

Organizations that own or manage transformer fleets across multiple sites face a coordination problem that per-site monitoring does not solve. A fault developing at one of 80 substations may not surface in any local indicator until it is close to failure.

Magnefy's fleet health dashboard provides a single view across all monitored assets: current health scores, active alerts sorted by severity, and trend data that shows which assets are progressing toward a fault class. Asset managers can filter by location, voltage class, age, or manufacturer to prioritize inspection resources across the fleet.

80%

Of transformer failures in fleets 10+ years old involve detectable EM precursors

6x

Ratio of unplanned to planned repair cost for the same fault class in oil-filled distribution transformers

3 yr

Average additional service life extension from condition-based maintenance vs. calendar-based replacement

Industry data: IEEE Transformer Committee and DOE Grid Modernization Initiative publications, 2023-2024.

Results Context

What a 3-6 week warning window is actually worth

The monetary value of an early fault warning depends on how the organization operates and what failure mode is being prevented. We have seen the same 17-day warning produce very different outcomes depending on context.

For a utility with regulatory reporting obligations, the value is partly compliance: a planned repair with a customer notice avoids the regulatory filing that follows an unplanned outage. For a manufacturer running a 24-hour operation, the value is production continuity: scheduling the repair into a planned shutdown avoids losing an entire production day.

UTILITY CONTEXT

$1.5M+

Typical unplanned substation outage cost including crew, regulatory, and downstream damage

INDUSTRIAL CONTEXT

1 shift

Planned repair cost vs. full production day lost for the same fault resolved reactively

Talk through your specific fleet context

A 30-minute conversation with our engineering team. We look at your asset profile and explain what Magnefy detects on fleets like yours.