Tag: lake

Downtime: It Isn’t Always BAD

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

When you say Downtime in an industrial or manufacturing setting, it may easily carry a negative connotation. This means that the output of production is not happening and input to production has halted as well. If this is not planned, it is absolutely a worst-case scenario. In our personal lives, though, downtime generally doesn’t have a negative meaning behind it. That’s the time to disconnect and recharge to maximize your output after you return to production and that is exactly what I had the luxury to do recently. This is also a message I received from a person I look up to and trust in their experiences. Vacation time can be looked at similar to a preventative and planned downtime of equipment. Without it we just wear down and eventually productivity grinds to a halt. While hanging out at a lake with my daughters this past week, I helped them hone their fishing skills. They each baited their own hooks with worms and chose their spots. We completely slayed some bluegills, and released every single one of them.

The calm of a storm rolling in when you have nothing to do is serene.

Prescribed maintenance, preventative maintenance, vacations all help to build back into the production of whatever good or service the company provides. The entire production of a facility all starts with the utilities, energy, water, compressed air, steam, other compressed gases, and the personnel. If your power input isn’t maintained, monitoring connections and disconnects, you can find yourself with a lack of service, resulting in dangerous situations. City water is often required for processes or for the facility to function properly, even an office building needs it for plumbing, fire suppression, and drinking. Steam, compressed gases and compressed air may all be required by the processes.

Servicing the compressed air where it starts is one of the most critical steps in operating a compressed air system. Making sure that your compressor has the minimum downtime, all starts with the preventative and prescriptive maintenance. One of the first tasks should always be changing and monitoring the intake air filter. Like Russ Bowman said a while back in his blog, take a deep breath, if you sneeze or smell something that is from the intake air your nose just took in from the surrounding area. That’s even after your nose hair has already partially filtered air intake. Your compressor is no different. If you let it suck up debris, dust, and pollen, then it is eventually going to have a failure. Instead of sneezing, it may burn up a vane, valve, scroll or screw. That is going to be a considerably higher cost and longer downtime than just performing the manufacturer’s listed items to maintain optimal performance.

The compressor shown above according to the caretaker receives a regular change on the airfilter every month. This is just before the cleaning and changeover. Not only do they change the filter, they make sure to clean the entire housing inside and out. That’s one of the ways this compressor has lasted with minimal downtime over the past 20 years.

If you want to learn more about other key maintenance items in your compressed air system, please contact an Application Engineer today.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

Putting In The Work: No Matter Where

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

Last week I was on vacation with my wife’s family.  We had the good fortune of going to Lake Norman, NC and renting a house for everyone to stay in.   While vacation was on a lake and we all had a boat load of fun (mainly because we had a pontoon boat for a week).  Work still needed to get done.   This wasn’t work from the Application Engineering position here at EXAIR.  This work was physically more difficult.

This was training for an event I will be doing hopefully within the next year.  I’ve been attending a Tuesday morning workout for the past six months or so with two other men, who are both Marine veterans and I thank them for their service.  This work we put in on Tuesday morning and a few other random times throughout the week is all for the same events.   The events are put on by a company called GORUCK.  (Yes, just like EXAIR, it is all CAPS all the time, one word.)  These events are classified as endurance events and are lead by either an active or retired Special Forces cadre.  There are different versions but they are all heald to the same standard for participants.  Put in the work, rely on your team, and everyone will get through it together.

At most of the events very few people know each other that well.  This makes forming a team within the few hours you are together very difficult.  That is until you are under a time hack when everyone has their weighted ruck on their back, you have a few hundred extra pounds of sand bags to carry and because it is fun to watch the Cadre gives you a casualty that now has to be buddy carried.  The main focus is to get people of all walks of life, all abilities, all physical aptitudes to come together, build into one another, and make sure everyone is at the end getting a patch to wear on their ruck.

This is why, on every Tuesday I try to put in some hard work mixed in with a lot of stairs.   While I was on vacation and could have easily let that weekly training go, I didn’t.  Instead I got out a deck of cards for the number of reps to each exercise, grabbed a 60 lbs and 40 lb sandbag and went to the tallest section of stairs we had close by, the dock stairs.

While going through the exercises, panting and glistening (for those that don’t know that’s the fancy word for seriously sweating), my youngest daughter came down to “help” me workout.  The look on her face was at first confusion, then after a brief talk and explaining I am trying to better myself by doing this, she switched to full on support.

Burpees have never felt so good until you have a 4 year old cheering you on.  Once I was done with all of my reps and had made over 6 trips up and down the steps with the 60 lb. sandbag I carried my sandbags and followed her in to the house for some well deserved breakfast.

This work could have been easily pushed to the side and not completed.  Instead, I embraced it and did it.  I was going to do the work even if anyone wasn’t watching because I want to better myself so that I may better any team that I am part of.

This same level of dedication is put in to everything we do here at EXAIR.  Customer service, production, assembly, product design, order entry, accounting, and marketing all dedicate to ensure that we fill the needs of our customers because we want to become a strong part of their team.   Whether it means digging deeper on testing a product in order to get some data at different operating pressure, or creating a 100% custom product that we have never manufactured before, we dedicate to the customer and ensure that all possibilities are exhausted so that the customer and EXAIR can both succeed.

If you have any questions about how EXAIR can help your team to reduce compressed air consumption, increase plant efficiency, and save energy through compressed air usage, please contact us.

Brian Farno
Application Engineer
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF