The video below is a brief introduction to the EXAIR Efficiency Lab, a free service provided by EXAIR for customers within the USA and Canada.
If you have a single point blowoff that does not have an engineered nozzle, or if you have a wider format blowoff, manifold or home-made drilled pipe, contact an Application Engineer with EXAIR and let us help you to reduce your energy waste. Following are some examples of product where we have helped to save some serious air and reduced noise levels which heightens employee comfort.
Non-engineered blowoffsDrilled and soldered copper pipe.Custom manufactured inefficient pipe blowoff
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.
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)
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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.
