Preventative Dry Ice Blasting
We are seeing another upturn for our dry ice blasting services. This is mainly as companies are realising the benefits of preventative maintenance rather than reactive maintenance.
I’ve spoken in previous blogs about a preventative solution to removing bitumen by using dry ice blasting.
Here is an example of how a reactive blast on an Autoclave boiler has turned to a scheduled preventative contract.
When the wax build-up inside the boiler reaches a certain thickness, it takes a longer time for the autoclave to reach temperature and pressure. Our customer would usually call us in 3 times a year to decontaminate. A cost analysis was carried out to detail how much extra energy was used and how much time of lost production was accumulating whilst waiting for the boiler to reach optimum working pressures/temps, due the thickness of the wax build-up.
Saving Calculations
The calculations meant that in the period where wax had built up to over 10cm, the extra cost to reach pressure was costing £78 per casting. The machine was also running longer by 2 hours per casting, costing extra £24 in energy and lost production of 10 hours over 2 working shifts at a cost of £1056. Estimated loss per week due to build up is £4188.00. The machine would run for roughly 4 weeks at these losses before we were called to dry ice blast. So far that’s £16750 in losses between dry ice blasting.
This was offset to the cost of our service, and a 6-week schedule for dry ice blasting has now been implemented.
So, by using a preventative strategy to the maintenance of the Autoclave, the machine now runs at optimum levels all year round and the company are still saving money even after tripling our services!