There's no invoice when a tech spends 20 minutes resetting a pump, no receipt when a procedure runs long because a backup fluid warmer or CRI pump had to be pulled from another room. The cost gets absorbed into payroll, overtime, and client patience.
But maybe it doesn’t have to.
This blog covers data from our 2026 Veterinary IV Pump Survey. The full report includes findings on staffing challenges, equipment spending, fluid therapy trends, and business sustainability across 114 companion animal practices.
Here's what our survey found
We asked 114 companion animal practices how many hours per week their team spends on equipment maintenance and troubleshooting.
Hours per week | % of practices |
Less than 2 hours | 24% |
2-5 hours | 38% |
6-10 hours | 24% |
11-20 hours | 10% |
More than 20 hours | 4% |
76% of practices spend two or more hours per week, and 38% spend more than five. At a $25/hour tech wage, five hours a week comes to roughly $6,500 a year in labor spent on unplanned maintenance. That's enough to buy a patient-ready refurbished veterinary IV pump.
Two survey respondents described what those hours look like in practice.
"Probably 4-5 hours a week across the team. That's not scheduled maintenance. Someone on staff will end up spending 20 minutes fiddling with it while a patient waits." (Practice owner, Tampa, FL)
"If I added up every time someone troubleshoots a sensor alarm or resets a pump it's probably 8-10 hours a week across the practice. That's a full shift of lost productivity we weren’t tracking until 2025." (Practice manager, Richmond, VA)
The schedule has no room to absorb it
The 2025 AVMA Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession shows the average full-time veterinarian completes about 15 scheduled appointments per day at roughly 30 minutes per patient. That's a full clinical day with no slack built in. Every unplanned equipment problem has to steal time from something already on the schedule.
The same report found 19.3% of practice owners say they're falling behind on technology in their practice. The top reason, at 31.3%, was time constraints. The equipment problems consume the hours that would otherwise go toward fixing the equipment problems.
What one pump failure does to an afternoon
Here's the cascade in a typical practice running a full schedule.
Time | What happens |
2:10 PM | A pump displays repeated occlusion alarms mid-procedure. The line seems clear and fine. A tech starts troubleshooting. |
2:30 PM | After 20 minutes, the tech gives up and grabs a pump from another area in the clinic, interrupting monitoring on that patient. |
2:40 PM | The vet's 2:30 appointment finally starts. Every appointment behind it inherits the delay. |
3:00 PM | The scheduled surgery gets pushed to 3:40. |
5:20 PM | The last client of the day has been sitting in the waiting room for 40 extra minutes. Two staff members stay late. |
The financial statements record this afternoon as a normal day. Zero equipment expense. But the practice paid for it in tech labor, overtime, a disrupted surgical schedule, and a client who now associates the practice with waiting.
Image courtesy of Envato
Getting the cost onto paper where you can manage it
A cost you can see is a cost you can control. Two moves put this one on an invoice instead of your payroll.
Repair the pumps that keep stealing time. A pump that generates weekly troubleshooting sessions is telling you it needs service. Apply the 50% rule: if the repair costs less than half the replacement cost, repair it. AIV Vet's flat-rate depot repair carries a 3-5 business day turnaround and a 6-month warranty, so the expense is fixed, planned, and visible on your books, which is everything the troubleshooting labor isn't.
Put your pumps on a preventive maintenance schedule. Most practices don't have one. They have a reactive workflow that activates every time a pump misbehaves. Scheduled maintenance costs less than reactive troubleshooting and it converts an unpredictable weekly time drain into a planned annual expense. For a practice losing five hours a week, the case for prevention is the $6,500 already leaving the building.
Image courtesy of Envato
What does this mean for your practice?
Three things to do based on the data.
Track your troubleshooting hours for a month. Ask staff to log every reset, alarm investigation, and manufacturer call. Multiply the average weekly total by your loaded tech wage, then by 52. That's your real annual equipment cost that no financial statement shows.
Identify your repeat offenders. If one or two pumps generate most of the interruptions, price a flat-rate repair against replacement and apply the 50% rule.
Build a maintenance schedule before the next failure builds one for you. Calibration and preventive service reduce false alarms and mid-procedure failures, which is where the cascade starts.
About this data
This data comes from the 2026 AIV-Vet Veterinary IV Pump Survey. Scheduling and technology adoption data is from the 2025 AVMA Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession.