What it costs to find it late
The same defect, priced at four points on its way to failure. Every slider starts on a realistic figure for a typical Australian site — change them to yours.
Failure is rarely sudden. A connection runs a few degrees warm for months, a bearing gets noisy before it seizes, a leak wets one sheet of plasterboard before it reaches the slab. That stretch between detectable and failed is the only window where the repair is small, planned, and yours to schedule.
The cost does not climb in a straight line across that window, which is why the curve bends. Every step later brings in collateral damage, downtime, premium labour and someone else’s timetable.
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Method — every dollar figure here is yours. You enter the repair cost at failure, your downtime rate and the hours you would lose; the tool scales your repair figure down to earlier points on the same defect using fixed fractions, and prices the downtime each point actually needs. Those fractions are the only assumption, they are shown against each point, and they are deliberately conservative — a retorque against a burnt board, a re-grease against a rewind, a traced and sealed leak against a rebuilt balcony. The starting figures are typical of the commercial and industrial jobs we see, and the inspection programme default uses our own published rates; they are there to be changed, not relied on. Nothing here is a quote, and no scenario assumes a defect is always found: condition monitoring shortens the odds, it does not eliminate failure.