Category: Sustainability

Lost In The Din? Not With An Ultrasonic Leak Detector!

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

Have you ever found yourself in a noisy environment, trying to hear what someone is saying to you? They could speak up, but sometimes that’s not enough. You might find yourself cupping your hand to your ear…this does two things:

*It blocks a lot of the noise from the environment.  This could also be called “filtering” – more on that in a minute.
*It focuses the sound of the speaker’s voice towards your ear.

IMG_1339
“What? They’re ALL still RIGHT behind me?”

Now, this isn’t a perfect solution, but you’ll likely have much better luck with this in a busy restaurant than, say, at a rock concert. Especially if it’s The Who…those guys are LOUD (vintage loud). If you’re at one of their concerts, whatever your friend has to say can probably wait.

You know what else can be loud?  Industrial workplaces.  Heavy machinery, compressed air leaks, cranes, forklifts, power tools, cranky supervisors/personnel…there are lots of unpleasant but necessary (mostly) sources of sound and noise, right here, where we work.

In the middle of all this, your supervisor might just task you with finding – and eliminating – compressed air leaks…like the person I talked to on the phone this morning.  This is where our Ultrasonic Leak Detector comes in: in places with high noise levels, it could be difficult (if not downright impossible) to hear air leaks.

Most of that noise from the machinery, cranes, etc., is in the “audible” range, which simply means that it’s of a frequency that our ears can pick up.  In a quiet room, you could likely hear an air leak…all but the very smallest ones will make a certain amount of noise…but when a compressed fluid makes its way out of a tortuous path to atmospheric pressure, gets turbulent, and creates an ultrasonic sound it is a frequency that our ears CAN’T pick up on.

Not only does the Ultrasonic Leak Detector pick up on this ultrasonic sound, it can also block (or “filter”) the audible sound out.  It comes with a parabola and a tubular extension so you can hone right in on the area, and then the exact location, of the leak.

If you’d like to find out more about compressed air leak detection, how much you might be able to save by fixing leaks, or how this could make your supervisor a bit less cranky (no guarantees on that last one,) give us a call.

Russ Bowman
Application Engineer
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IMG_1339 courtesy of Rich Hanley  Creative Commons License

EXAIR Continues To Bring New Products To Market

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

The latest and greatest news from EXAIR that you may have seen in trade magazines is our High Lift Reversible Drum Vac System.  While some of you may have seen these in the catalog and possibly even bought one before you saw this picture in a magazine, we hadn’t released them to the world through press yet. This latest addition to our Industrial Housekeeping product line will help you remove liquid from sunken pits, wells and below grade vessels. The High Lift Reversible Drum Vac provides up to 15′ of lift while pumping 38 gallons per minute! As with many of our other vacuums there are no moving parts to wear out or fail and they can be run continuously in harsh conditions. These vacuums are the workhorses of our Industrial Housekeeping product line and could be the last vacuum you ever buy! So stop burning up electric vacuum motors and take advantage of our 30 day unconditional trial to test it for yourself.

EXAIR's High Lift RDV makes cleaning out pits up to 15' deep easy and fast.
EXAIR’s High Lift RDV makes cleaning out pits easy and fast.

We generate so many new products that the magazines can’t keep up with them, that is unless you would want to see a miniature EXAIR catalog in the new products section of your favorite trade magazine.  So keep an eye out, you might just notice something that we snuck onto the web page or into the catalog without you noticing.  As long as our customers continue to have a need for new and different product, we will continue to support them and expand our product offering.  To top it all off, we will never bore you with the same press release month after month or year after year trying to act like a product is actually new.

Brian Farno
Application Engineer Manager
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

Where Does 25 Cents For 1,000 Standard Cubic Feet Of Air Come From?

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

Wasting compressed air 2

Being an Application Engineer at EXAIR you tend to do a good amount of return on investment (ROI) calculations.   This is mainly to tell customers just how fast installing an EXAIR product on their system is going to pay its purchase price back and start saving them money.

In order to do these calculations there are several variables we must know.   The list is below.

  • Cost of EXAIR Product (This is an easy one for us to know.)
  • EXAIR Product Consumption (Another easy one!)
  • Current Product Consumption (If this is an unknown, we will test it for free!)
  • Cost of Compressed Air / 1,000 SCF (This is the most common unknown.)

With these four variables we can calculate the amount of air and the amount of money the EXAIR product will save over an existing non-engineered blowoff.   Let me address the two variables which have to come from you, the customer.

Current Product Consumption – If this value is not known please don’t guess at it.  We offer a free service which we refer to as our Efficiency Lab where you send us in your existing blowoff device and we will test it for force flow and noise level.   If you don’t know what pressure you are operating the piece at we will help you find out how to get that and then we will test our products at the same pressures.   This way you get a true apple to apples comparison.   Then, once we are done testing, you will get a recommendation from us in a formal report as to what EXAIR product will best replace your existing product.  Then we will pay for return shipping of your blowoff device back to you. So, if you don’t know how much air you are currently using then give us a call.  We will figure it out for you.

Efficiency Lab
The EXAIR Efficiency Lab is FREE!

Cost of Compressed Air/ 1,000 SCF – This is more often than not, the unknown variable in the equation.  The good news is there is a general standard assumption of twenty-five cents per 1,000 Standard Cubic Feet of compressed air.   This works out to be around 8 cents per kW/hr.  So even if you don’t know what you pay to compress the air, if you know what you are paying per kilowatt hour for your energy then we can calculate within reason what it costs for you to generate your compressed air. For reference, 8 cents per kilowatt-hour falls between the average US cost per kilowatt hour for commercial end-users (10.7/kWh) and industrial end-users (6.9/kWh).*

The best part of all is…EXAIR has a calculator available right on our website which provides air and dollar savings per minute, hour day and year as well as a payback in days for the EXAIR product purchase. On top of that, any step along the way that you aren’t sure of, we will help you out for free, even testing your product!

In case you would like to see the math, the formula used is below.

Basic Equation To Go From Cost Per kiloWatt Hour to Cost Per 1,000 Standard Cubic Feet of Compressed Air
Basic equation to go from Cost Per kiloWatt Hour to Cost Per 1,000 Standard Cubic Feet of Compressed Air

Brian Farno
Application Engineer Manager
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

*latest U.S. EIA report here

 

 

 

The Best Lunch Is One Prepared For You

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

This past week was another celebration here at EXAIR, in case you didn’t notice, we like to do that here.  This wasn’t a birthday, anniversary or someone leaving the team, it was another record breaker for the EXAIR team.   I know we have talked about cookouts before and these only happen for special occasions.   Nonetheless when you have the EXAIR management team, including the owner and President, grilling everyone’s lunch –  it is a great day.

You can see our Production Manager doing some quality inspection here.
You can see our Production Manager doing some quality inspection here.

This builds so much camaraderie through the ranks of EXAIR that I don’t know any way to do it better.   The entire time we had the cookout there was still no hiccup in our standard operations either, that means if you called in, you still got to speak to a live person and not a recording.   That is the level of service that we provide every day, every week, every month, and every year.   That is what sets us apart from any of our competition and allows us to continue to reach higher goals than we have ever reached before.

MMMmmmmmmm!!!!! Steak!
MMMmmmmmmm!!!!! Steak!

Now if you will excuse me,  I need to go take a jog and try to work myself out of this food coma from the steak.

Brian Farno
Application Engineer Manager
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF