Most equipment failures are not age-related.  The equipment will provide some sign of impending failure if we have the right tools available to understand the change in condition.

A lot of facilities assign monitoring intervals based upon arbitrary schedules such as 30,  90, 180, or 365 days.

Often this is due to a lack of understanding of how equipment fails, misunderstanding of how conditional tasks such as vibration analysis work, available labor, and lack of importance placed upon Condition Monitoring (CM) efforts.  These arbitrary collection intervals can actually lead to failures that go undetected and a loss of value from the effort.  The equipment will tell you how often monitoring must be completed.  Not understanding this can lead to costly results!

How does your facility determine the correct monitoring intervals for CM efforts?  Is it based upon manpower, gut feel, P-F Interval, or what someone told you to do?