Tag: air savings

How Much Money Will You Save with Engineered Air Nozzles

Published on by exaircorpLeave a comment

The simplicity of installing an air nozzle and the importance of saving compressed air (which in turn saves money) go hand-in-hand with our engineered air nozzle product line. For an 8 hour shift running 250 days per year, replacing one 1/4″ open air tube can save $650 dollars per year. Replacing any run-of-the-mill, commercial air nozzle can typically save $330 dollars per year!

How many open tubes or commercial air nozzles do you have?
10 tube replacements = $6500 saved per year
25 tube replacements = $16,250 saved per year
50 tube replacements = $32,500 saved per year                          

10 commercial nozzle replacements = $3300 saved per year
25 commercial nozzle replacements = $8250 saved per year
50 commercial nozzle replacements = $$16,500 saved per year

If you want to know EXACTLY how much replacing your current compressed air blow off devices with EXAIR engineered air nozzles will save you, take advantage of our free Efficiency Lab. We will test your current device for flow, force and noise levels with our calibrated equipment. You will receive a report with all the details, including and ROI – which is generally within weeks!Capture2

 

To see our complete line of nozzles, get our Blowoff Guide sent to your desk. EXAIR offers Air Nozzles ranging in thread size from our smallest Atto Super Air Nozzle with an M4 thread providing 2.0 ounces of force to our largest 1-1/4″ NPT Super Air Nozzle providing 23 lbs. of force. In addition to the various thread size and force levels, select nozzles are also offered in brass, stainless steel, zinc aluminum alloy and even PEEK plastic for superior chemical resistance or applications needing a non-marring nozzle (a maintenance crew for a large telescope used the PEEK nozzles to blow off their large mirrors). Offering such a wide variety to choose from, selection can seem like a daunting task. Luckily we have you covered with our FREE Blowoff Guide to help make the best product selection for your needs. The Blowoff Guide features performance specs as well as dimensional information and airflow patterns. Some things to consider when making a choice would be matching existing pipe size, material compatibility, noise level in the area, compressed air requirement and/or force required for successful blowoff.

Blowoff guide
To order your FREE Blowoff Guide, please click here.

We also offer a few handy accessories for our Air Nozzles as well. For example our Flexible Stay Set Hose are available with 1/4 MNPT X 1/4 MNPT fittings or 1/4 MNPT x 1/8 FNPT connections and lengths from 6″ up to 36″. The Stay Set Hose can be bent to deliver the air to the critical area while holding position until it is manually repositioned.

stay sets
Flexible and durable, EXAIR Stay Set Hoses come in lengths from 6″ to 36″.

Additionally we offer our Swivel Fittings allowing for 25 degrees of movement to provide the best angle for air delivery to the part. These useful tools are available in 316ss or 303ss from M4 thread up to our largest 1″ NPT size.

Swivel Fittings
Swivel Fittings make it easy to adjust the aim of your Air Nozzle.

For help selecting the right engineered Air Nozzle and accessory to fit your specific application, please contact EXAIR for assistance.

Justin Nicholl
Application Engineer
justinnicholl@exair.com
@EXAIR_JN

 

Save Money By Using Your Own Thermostat? Well…

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

Last week, I wrote about what a great idea it is to use a thermostat with a Cabinet Cooler System. I’ll let another cat out of the bag right now and tell you that there are less expensive thermostats than ours. But just like the savings you might realize on the purchase by foregoing a thermostat, using a poorly specified thermostat can also be the last savings you see.

In a Cabinet Cooler System application, we’re refrigerating air. This makes for a cool, clean, and dry atmosphere for your electrical & electronic components to operate in.

UL Listed & CE Compliant, EXAIR Cabinet Cooler Systems maintain NEMA 4, 4X, or 12 integrity.
UL Listed & CE Compliant, EXAIR Cabinet Cooler Systems maintain NEMA 4, 4X, or 12 integrity.

Not all thermostats are designed to read air temperature – in fact, a LOT of common, commercially available thermostats are designed for use with liquid. Using these to control air temperature will lead to slow response times. That means one of two things will happen:

When the air inside the enclosure is cooled to the thermostat’s set-point temperature, it won’t shut off the compressed air flow to the Cabinet Cooler unit, resulting in unnecessary compressed air consumption.  And that’s a shame.

OR:

When the air inside the enclosure is heated to the thermostat’s set-point temperature, it won’t start the compressed air flow to the Cabinet Cooler unit, resulting in a potential overheating of those expensive…or critical…or both…electronic components.  And that’s a REAL shame.

We don’t want to see you using any more compressed air than you need to.  And we SERIOUSLY don’t want to see you fry your electronics.  If you’d like to find out more about EXAIR Cabinet Cooler Systems, give me a call.

Russ Bowman
Application Engineer
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A Perfect Fit for Primary Metal Manufacturing

Published on by Lee EvansLeave a comment

Primary metal manufacturing and processing plants tend to have a variety of applications using compressed air, some of which can be quite large.  Our Finnish distributor found just such an application, using a high volume of compressed air under unsafe conditions.

20151111_122132
Homemade air gun at a metal manufacturing plant in Finland

In the photo above you can see a homemade air gun used to provide a high force blow off.  This unit has a welded cone on the end of a metal pipe using a ¼ turn ball valve to control the compressed air.  When the ball valve is turned the airflow remains constant until the operator returns the valve to the closed position.  This means that if the operator were to let go of the unit for any reason, the air gun would continue to blow, creating a safety hazard.

In addition to this concern, the welded cone at the end of the pipe provides no protection for high dead end pressures, creating a potential source of an air embolism if contacting human skin.  This can lead to difficulty breathing, chest pain, low blood pressure, or even a stroke (Source: MedScape; Venous Air Embolism; Updated December 8th, 2015).

The end user had accepted the risks associated with this homemade device because they were unaware of anything in the market capable of meeting the volume and force necessary to meet their application needs.  That is, until they were shown the EXAIR Super Blast Safety Air Gun model 1218.

Feeding the compressed air through an automatically closing ball valve, the 1218 removed the threat of unwanted flow from such a high force air gun.  The model 1218 also provides more than enough force and flow – the existing setup uses a 1-1/4” diameter orifice with a flow rate of 1986 SCFM (56,233 SLPM) with an unknown entrainment ratio; the 1218 has a flow rate of 460 SCFM (13,026 SLPM) with an entrainment ratio of 25:1, making the total directed flow equal to 11,500 SCFM (325,650 SLPM)!  This means the application can produce better or equal performance at a fraction of the compressed air consumption, thanks to the engineered design of EXAIR nozzles.  (See below for operational cost comparison.)

By converting to an EXAIR Super Blast Safety Air Gun this customer was able to add safety, increase performance, and lower operating costs.  If you have an application you think could benefit from better safety, performance, or operating cost, contact an EXAIR Application Engineer.

Lee Evans
Application Engineer
LeeEvans@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_LE

 

Compressed air costs are calculated as follows:

Previous setup:

1,986 SCFM compressed air consumption.  At a cost of $0.25/1000 SCF this equates to:

1,986 * ($0.25/1000) = $0.4965 for every minute of use

EXAIR model 1218:

460 SCFM compressed air consumption.  At the same cost of $0.25/1000 SCF this equates to:

460 * ($0.25/1000) = $0.115 for every minute of use

When comparing the two, the EXAIR model 1218 will provide an operational cost savings of almost 77%!

And, if you’re wondering how we determined the airflow through the existing setup, we used the charts below.

air calcs
Air calcs for the flow through a 1-1/4″ orifice

Calculating Compressed Air Cost & Savings Made Easy

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

If you have ever looked through our catalog, website, blog, twitter feeds, or even our Facebook page, you will see that we can almost always put a dollar amount behind the amount of compressed air you saved by installing EXAIR’s Intelligent Compressed Air Products.   No matter which platform we use to deliver the message, we use the same value for the cost of compressed air which is $.25 per 1,000 Standard Cubic Feet of compressed air. This value is derived from average commercial and industrial energy costs nationwide, if you are on either coast this value may increase slightly. On the positive side, if your cost for compressed air is a bit more, installing an EXAIR product will increase your savings.

So where does this number come from?   I can tell you this much, we didn’t let the marketing department or anyone in Accounting make it up.   This is a number that the Engineering department has deemed feasible and is accurate.

To calculate the amount we first look to what the cost per kilowatt hour is you pay for energy.  Then we will need to know what the compressor shaft horsepower  of the compressor is, plus the run time percentage, the percentage at full-load, and the motor efficiency.

If you don’t have all of these values, no worries.   We can get fairly close by using the industry accepted standard mentioned above, or use some other general standards if all you know is the cost of your electricity.

The way to calculate the cost of compressed air is not an intense mathematical equation like you might think.  The best part is, you don’t even have to worry about doing any of the math shown below because you can contact us and we can work through it for you.

If you prefer to have us compare your current compressed air blow off or application method to one of our engineered products, we can do that AND provide you a report which includes side by side performance comparisons (volume of flow, noise, force) and dollar savings. This refers to our free Efficiency Lab service.

EXAIR's Efficiency Lab is a free service to all US customers.
EXAIR’s Efficiency Lab is a free service to all US customers.

If you already know how much air you are using, you can use the Air Savings Calculators (USD or Euro) within our website’s knowledge base. Just plug in the numbers (EXAIR product data is found on our website or just contact us) and receive air savings per minute, hour, day and year. We also present a simple ROI payback time in days.

Now, back to the math behind our calculation.
Cost ($) =
(bhp) x (0.746) x (#of operating hours) x ($/kWh) x (% time) x ( % full load bhp)
——————————————————————————————————————————
Motor Efficiency

Where:
bhp — Compressor shaft horsepower (generally higher than motor nameplate Hp)
0.746 – conversion between hp and KW
Percent Time — percentage of time running at this operating level
Percent full-load bhp — bhp as percentage of full load bhp at this operating level
Motor Efficiency — motor efficiency at this operating level

For an average facility here in the Midwest $0.25/1,000 SCF of compressed air is accurate.   If you would like to attempt the calculation and or share with us your findings, please reach out to us.   If you need help, we are happy to assist.

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