Tag: vacation

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

ROI – Worth Looking at the Details

Published on by exaircorpLeave a comment

ROI or Return On Investment is a way to gauge the productivity or profit/loss from money spent on an investment. In business, companies will use this information to determine if a project or investment is worth the risk, ultimately leading to a net profit gain as the end result.

Don’t waste your money

In my own personal experience, my wife and I were considering buying into a timeshare vacation property a few years ago. To enter into the agreement, the company required a $ 22,000 “buy-in” (financed of course) and a recurring cost of approximately $60/month for the next 22 years. This would have afforded us 124 “points” for nightly stays on our planned vacation. Their timeshare rentals are tiered into different room types – Studio, 1 bedroom, 2 bedroom or a 3 bedroom villas – with each room type costing a certain amount of points. For us to maximize the length of our stay, we would have to select the studio room which would have given 6 nights at a total of the 124 points.

We have visited this popular vacation destination several times so we know what the average cost is to spend a week on property and purchase theme park tickets for our stay. When we booked on our own, we spent on average a little less than $ 3,000 for 7 days which included our room each night and 6 day park passes per person.

The timeshare rental cost was just for the nightly stay, it didn’t include any park tickets, food or other recreations. On average, the cost for 6 days worth of park passes per adult is close to $ 450.00 and per child it was around $ 400.00. Considering there are 2 adults and 1 child (at the time) we had to pay an additional cost of $ 1,300.00.

So if we joined the timeshare and stayed for 1 week once a year, it was going to cost us approximately $ 3,020.00 ($ 1,720.00 (timeshare cost) + $ 1,300.00 in tickets). In this case, it was actually going to cost us MORE in the long run than if we booked a yearly vacation on our own (< $3,000), leading to a negative ROI. (not to mention, I really didn’t want to commit to the same vacation for the next 22 years!).

When discussing replacement compressed air blowoff solutions with a customer, many times they look at the purchase price of the device and question if it’s worth it for them to make a change. If you follow along with our blog, you will notice that over the last few months we have submitted several different entries relating to this topic, like replacing drilled pipe with our 12″ Super Air Knife resulting in a 47 day ROI or where a customer replaced 4 open copper tubes with our 1110SS Nano Super Air Nozzle and recurring their expenses in just 38 days. In these instances, we show the calculations in regards to the true cost of ownership and how quickly you can recover capital funds when considering the whole scope of the project.

At EXAIR, we are committed to providing Intelligent Compressed Air® Products that reduce compressed air consumption leading to a more efficient process, as well as increasing operator safety. If you are considering an EXAIR solution for your current process but have questions about price or performance, contact one of our application engineers for assistance.

Justin Nicholl
Application Engineer
justinnicholl@exair.com
@EXAIR_JN

 

Little things add up image courtesy of Nic McPhee via creative commons license

EXAIR Won’t Keep You Waiting For Anything

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

Have you ever sent an email, or left a voice mail message for someone without knowing they were out of the office? It can be pretty frustrating to not hear back from someone, especially if your needs are urgent.

At EXAIR, we make sure this doesn’t happen:

*For starters, we don’t have an automated attendant…if you call EXAIR during normal business hours, you’re going to talk to a real live human being.

*What’s more, that real live human being is going to be one of our Customer Service Representatives, and they can answer any questions you might have about price and availability of any of our Engineered Compressed Air Products.

*If you need detailed technical information, they’ll transfer you to an Application Engineer…and they are always keenly aware of who’s available & who’s not.  You won’t get anyone’s voice mail unless you specifically ask for it, and if one of us is on vacation (and won’t be able to return your call for a number of days,) you’ll know that before you’re transferred to leave that message.

*Not only that, but we’ve got a system in place to monitor each other’s emails.  Which brings me to the success story that inspired this blog:

It’s vacation season, and another of us took off for some well deserved R&R with the family.  According to The System, I get to check those incoming emails while this co-worker is out.  And he (like the rest of us) gets a LOT of emails.  Some are new requests for application/performance data, and some are continuing conversations of the details of (sometimes) complex applications.  Like the project he was working on with a customer who wanted to use Air Knives to blow off a continuous strip of material exiting a wash/rinse vessel.  After a discussion of the details of the application, they had decided to try (2) Model 110003 3″ Aluminum Super Air Knives, one mounted on either side, to “strip the strip.”  And it worked perfectly.  They just wanted to run the details of this first installation by us before doing the other seven.  Part of my process was to go back through the chain of emails…while this looked pretty straight forward, the devil is indeed in the details, and I hate that guy.  But, try as I might (sorry; I’m an engineer,) I could not find fault, or room to improve, with the setup they designed…it was most pleasantly devil-free.

Compact, efficient and quiet, the EXAIR 3″ Super Air Knife is an ideal blow off solution for a variety of applications.

Anyway, with my agreement that their installation was indeed optimal (it’s exactly what I would have done too, for the record,) they placed an order for the (14) Super Air Knives to outfit the other (7) wash/rinse operations.

If we were keeping score, it would be coworker-2, Russ-14.  But we’re not.  Lest my record suffer when I “break for the Lake” in June.  By then, it’ll be Cabinet Cooler Season, and I almost hate to miss a week of that.  Almost.

Man, I don’t even take long pants with me to the Lake.

If you have questions about compressed air products or applications, we’ve got answers.  Live and in real time, every day.  Call us; let’s talk.

Russ Bowman
Application Engineer
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Back From Vacation With a Lot of Ideas

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

Last week I went on the annual trip to Topsail Island, NC with my family and all of the in-laws.   The week lends plenty of time to relax, play on the beach, see a shark 10′ away from you in the water…you know the normal stuff.   I couldn’t help but think as to what my next project at home needs to be, not a “real” project at home but one I will enjoy, a hobby project if you will.   I went to my favorite place in North Carolina for some much needed relaxation and input, Saigon Sam’s, a military surplus store.  It’s really more than just a military surplus store, it has that museum feel as well due to all of the relics and weapons it showcases.

Saigon Sams

 

After seeing how a lot of military items have been re-purposed and watching a few of the old Professor videos, I have decided that my next project for home will be making a Tall Bike.  What is a tall bike you ask?  Absolutely awesome is what I would say.  The legitimate answer would be it is essentially two to three bikes welded together to form one really tall bike that is not easy to get on or off of.

2011-07-02 Bicycle Friends Tall Bike a

My hopes are that it will look something like the one pictured above.   However, due to budget constraints and my love for things that work instead of look good it may appear like the one below.

tandy

Just like here at EXAIR, even at home I am constantly thinking of new projects.   One of the newest projects that has wrapped up at EXAIR is the expansion of our Digital Flowmeter family.   These meters are now available to help you monitor your compressed air use on 1/2″ through 6″ schedule 40 iron pipe OR 3/4″ through 4″ Type L copper pipe.  The EXAIR Digital Flowmeters are simple to install and include a drill guide, drill and jig to make the process even easier. Also available is our USB Data Logger or Summing Remote Display to further the ease of collecting your compressed air use data.   If you want to compare two different lines that are the same size you can simply use a set of block off rings to clamp off the probe area while the Digital Flowmeter is in use on the other line.   This means you can easily use a single Digital Flowmeter and a few sets of block off rings to monitor all of your compressed air lines that are the same size.

dfm_sizes_pr_337w

These Digital Flowmeters are an essential first step toward understanding where your air is used, when it is at its highest use and where it is used. With this understanding, you can begin to work on making your air system more efficient and using your compressed air more effectively. Using flowmeters to monitor compressed air is the intelligent first step toward saving air and money for your company. Saving money on compressed air and operating an efficient system can help secure your competitive position now and into the future.

If you have any questions or want to know more about our Digital Flowmeter family, feel free to contact us.

Brian Farno
Application Engineer
@EXAIR_BF
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com