Readiness instruments

Tools that refuse to guess.

Most readiness tools in this market are quizzes that return a percentage and a sales call. These do something narrower and more useful: they compute what can actually be computed from a published standard, check what can actually be checked against a document, and then stop — out loud — at the point where the next answer belongs to an engineer or an authority having jurisdiction rather than to a web page.

Instrument · live

NERC CIP-014 · Transmission owners

The CIP-014 compliance clock

CIP-014 does not set one deadline. It sets a chain of them, and each link starts when the previous step actually finishes rather than when it was due — which is why a schedule built from due dates quietly drifts wrong the first time a step lands early or late.

Enter the date your Requirement R1 risk assessment completed and it returns the whole downstream schedule from the calendar-day intervals the standard states. Add the real R2 and R5 completion dates as you get them and everything after them moves accordingly; rows it had to infer are labelled as assumptions wherever they appear.

Open the compliance clock

It returns

Every R2, R3, R5 and R6 date, plus both 60-day response windows
The next assessment at 30 or 60 months, with correct month-end handling
Whether each supplied completion date landed early, on time, or late
A printable schedule, a copyable text version, and a shareable link

It will not tell you

Whether a station is in scope. That is an R1 engineering determination.
A readiness score. There is no such number in the standard.

Instrument · live

NFPA 855 & UL 9540A · Battery energy storage

The UL 9540A evidence check

“UL 9540A tested” is not one thing. The method runs at cell, module, unit and installation level, and they answer four different questions — only one of which is whether a fire in one enclosure reaches the next one. A great deal of what circulates as fire-safety evidence in this market is a lower-level result quoted as though it were the higher one.

Say what your vendor actually handed you, in what form, and for what kind of site. It returns a straight verdict on whether you are holding a submittal or a sales document, and an ordered list of what to ask for — written so you can forward it as it stands.

Open the evidence check

It returns

Where your evidence sits on the four-level ladder, and what that level can support
The checks an authority having jurisdiction is told to make, with section numbers
An ordered gap list, phrased as requests a vendor can act on
A printable and copyable record of what you were shown and when

It will not tell you

A separation distance. That is a determination by a fire protection engineer and your AHJ, on the evidence.
Whether the product is safe. It reads the file, not the battery.

Checklist · rebuild pending

Civic and public buildings

Public facility hardening readiness checklist

A framing checklist rather than an instrument: five questions that move a conversation from broad concern to a scope engineering, security, operations and procurement can all review. Useful for structuring a first internal meeting, and honest about being nothing more than that.

It is listed here as a checklist because that is what it is. The two above compute or check something; this one prompts. It is next in line to be rebuilt into an instrument, and until it is, we would rather say so than dress it up.

Open the checklist

It returns

Five framing questions across consequence, existing protection, gap, retrofit path and decision ownership

It will not tell you

Anything computed. There is no calculation behind it and no standard cited in it.

Side by side

Instrument	The question it answers	What it needs from you	The question it refuses	Who decides that one
CIP-014 compliance clock	When is each CIP-014 obligation due, given where we actually are?	One date: when the R1 risk assessment completed. Two more if you have them.	Is this substation in scope?	You, under Requirement R1, with your compliance function.
UL 9540A evidence check	Is the fire-test evidence we were given a submittal, and what is missing?	The test level, the document form, and what the report actually contains.	What separation distance applies here?	A registered design professional and your AHJ, on that evidence.
Facility hardening checklist	What should we be asking before this becomes a procurement?	Nothing. It is a list of questions.	Everything quantitative.	Your engineer of record.

Why they stop where they stop

Every one of these refuses to answer exactly one question, and the refusal is the design rather than a limitation we are apologising for.

The refused question is always the same shape: it is the one whose answer is a professional judgement recorded by someone who carries responsibility for it. Scope under CIP-014 is an engineering determination by the transmission owner. A separation distance under NFPA 855 is a determination by a fire protection engineer and an authority having jurisdiction, on the evidence in front of them. A tool that returned either from a few dropdowns would be producing a number with nobody behind it — and a number with nobody behind it is worth less than nothing in an audit or a plan review, because it invites a decision and then cannot defend one.

What is left after that subtraction is still substantial: arithmetic that is tedious and easy to get wrong, document checks that are well defined and routinely skipped, and deadlines that are already fixed by a standard whether or not anybody has worked them out. Those we will do, in full, with nothing held back behind a form.

Each instrument also states, on its own face, the one thing we are structurally disqualified from doing for you. CIP-014 R2 and R6 require an unaffiliated third party, and we are not one. Under NFPA 855 we can be neither the approved testing laboratory nor the registered design professional who interprets the data, because both have to sit outside the supply of the thing being justified. We would rather you read that here than discover it later.

Who is behind this. Preservation 2 is affiliated with Amidon (360 Ballistics, LLC), which manufactures protective construction materials and therefore sells into some of the decisions these instruments touch. Nothing here is compliance advice, a legal opinion or an engineering judgement, and every instrument names the standard it works from so you can check it against the source rather than against us.

Draft v0.01. The two instruments were last reviewed against their standards on 13 September 2026; each page carries its own review date and version watch. Found an error, a stale section number, or a case the logic gets wrong? Tell us — corrections are more useful to us than leads, and they are the fastest way to make these worth using.