Filter System Spares and Maintenance – the Importance of Planning
Our capital projects are often procured diligently with spares lists requested at the outset. However, it is often the case that money for the capital project is used before spares are ordered.
If the project has been designed with duty standby systems, the impact of a single component failure has less effect. However, if the capital project was procured efficiently without redundancy, then the effects of any failure can be significant in downtime and lost revenue.
The majority of our projects involve processes which are pivotal to revenue creation. Aluminium furnaces, waste to energy plants, glass processing plants all require a large thermal input to start up and cannot easily shut down to repair a failure in the system.
A bag filter can have a large number of filter bags, typically 300 to 1200 and due to the quantity this can be an investment of tens of thousands of pounds. However, with a typical 8 week lead time a filter bag failure can cause the plant to shut down when Industrial Emissions Directive (IED) limits need to be met.
So the message is clear, budget for spares and servicing labour and have the spares ready for use.
Typical lead times for typical spares are illustrated below:
- Filter bags 5 to 12 weeks
- Filter cages 8 weeks
- Complete rotary valve 6 weeks
- Pulse valve spares 2 to 5 weeks
- Vent filter cartridges 2 to 5 weeks
Filter Designs has an associated business at who can procure spares for our filter systems and others past and present. Call us on 01858 419 104 for an easy to use, friendly service.