Preventive Maintenance

A simple fault-finding technique. Fixing plant and equipment about which you know little is daunting. Here is a simple way to help you successfully find faulty or failed equipment.

We like to be warned about things well ahead of time: when to buy or sell a stock, when we can expect 3 to 6 inches of snow, etc. The same could be said about the equipment and systems that drive your processes every day. These critical and expensive assets are expected to produce the valuable products your company is known for with little or no interruption. We might have a reasonably clear picture of how things look today, but what about 30 days from now? Wouldn’t it be beneficial to have a picture of what our systems might look like that far into the future… and have confidence in that view?

Many impurities may transport to boilers via contaminated condensate return. Boiler tube and steam system failures are usually much more costly than preventive installation of treatment equipment and chemistry programs. This article touched upon only some of the important condensate return issues, but will hopefully galvanize readers to focus on these critical topics. 

Makeup water and condensate return treatment systems are often neglected until boiler failures occur, resulting in a reactive response by plant management. Such failures can cripple production and be enormously expensive. Much more importantly, some failures may jeopardize employee safety. This article examines the importance of proper operation and preventive maintenance of industrial makeup water treatment systems and the benefits that arise therefrom. 

Maintenance in the world of pumps is basically no different than any other machinery-based industry. It requires the same common sense and good practices that make any machine with moving parts run, accomplish goals, run with great dependability and most importantly, make the owner money.

When I am working with clients across multiple disciplines, I am sometimes surprised when they tell me they have the wrong people in some key positions and my task as the business coach or consultant will be to turn these wrong people into the right people. So, what went wrong? I believe there are two answers to this question. Either their hiring process was not up to the job, or in the time the employee had been with the company, the company had turned the right person into the wrong person.

As a facility manager, it’s important to implement strategies that help prevent surprise breakdowns from occurring. As part of those strategies, you must develop a plan that encourages preventive maintenance, not reactive maintenance. In many situations, waiting for a problem to arise will cost more money to fix than taking proactive measures to prevent it. There are various best practices that should be considered when preventive maintenance becomes a part of your overall facility maintenance strategy. As it pertains to our expertise, we will be focusing on preventive maintenance for unit heaters.

In most buildings, critical pipes carrying water and natural gas; cables carrying data and electricity; ventilation pipes carrying cool or warm air, are all typically hidden behind walls, out of sight. The facilities team needs to see them. They need to know where everything is and what each pipe connects to so that they can always maintain and ensure the proper functioning of these conduits. So how does one see through walls?