You cannot improve what you do not measure, and few things reveal more about an operation than how much of the time its equipment is actually running. Runtime and downtime tracking turns that into hard numbers - and, when downtime is categorized, into a map of where production is being lost.
Runtime/Downtime Tracking in one line: Runtime and downtime tracking is the automatic recording of how long equipment spends running versus stopped, used to calculate availability, quantify lost production, and - when downtime is tagged with reason codes - pinpoint the causes of losses.
At its simplest, a SCADA system watches a run status - a motor contactor, a pump discharge pressure, a flow above a threshold - and accumulates the time in each state. Runtime is the total time running; downtime is the total time stopped. From these, availability is calculated as runtime divided by the total scheduled time, usually expressed as a percentage. The same run counters also feed maintenance, since many service intervals are based on operating hours rather than calendar time.
The real value appears when downtime is categorized. Attaching reason codes - waiting on power, mechanical failure, planned maintenance, no feed, operator hold - converts raw downtime into an analysis of why production is lost. That is what lets a team rank causes and attack the biggest one, rather than knowing only that a site was down.
Across a large field, small differences in well or compressor availability compound into significant production and revenue. Tracking runtime per well surfaces the units that cycle or shut in most often; tracking downtime by reason surfaces whether the losses are electrical, mechanical, or operational. This directly informs where to send crews and where to invest in reliability.
Because SCADA already reads run status and flow from every site, runtime and downtime tracking is largely a matter of accumulating and reporting data the system is collecting anyway. A cloud SCADA platform that historizes this state can report availability and downtime by site and by reason across an entire operation, viewable in a browser, so a supervisor can compare uptime across dozens of remote wells without pulling logs from each one.
Availability is runtime divided by the total scheduled or available time, expressed as a percentage. If a pump ran 22 of 24 hours, its availability for that day is about 92 percent. Runtime and downtime tracking supplies both numbers automatically.
Reason codes turn raw downtime into a breakdown of causes - electrical, mechanical, planned, no feed, operator hold. That lets a team rank the biggest sources of lost production and target improvements, instead of only knowing that equipment was stopped.
It monitors a run indicator such as a motor contactor, discharge pressure, or flow above a threshold, and accumulates time in the running and stopped states. Those totals feed availability reports and operating-hour-based maintenance intervals.
Merobix reads your field devices into a cloud SCADA - the real thing behind these terms, live in days from any browser.