The Importance of Servicing Your Pump Systems
Performing regular preventative maintenance on your industrial pumps is critical to restoring performance, reliability and profitability in your operations. Pump maintenance is fundamental for extending the lifetime of pumps, enhancing pump performance, and securing greater cost efficiency.
Pumps are designed to operate at a single point known as the Best Efficiency Point (BEP). As components begin to wear, a pump’s performance begins to decline. When a pump’s operation moves away from this point it is likely due to issues such as accelerated bearing or seal wear, vibration, excess temperature rise or cavitation.
Performing regular preventative maintenance on all your industrial pumps is key to sustaining prosperous and productive operations all year round.
Quite often declining performance can start gradually, before quickly accelerating until failure if performance issues are not solved by preventive or corrective maintenance.
Much like regular car maintenance, scheduled industrial pump servicing is a critical practice for the longevity of your pump systems. The last thing you need is operations coming to a screeching halt, due to something that would have easily been avoided through preventative pump maintenance.
What Is Preventative Pump Maintenance?
Preventative pump maintenance is routine periodic inspection, maintenance and pump servicing to help prevent problems from happening in the first place, ensuring your pump is operating at peak efficiency. This generally involves periodic checks of the pump’s performance, visual inspection internally and externally of wearing parts, checking alignment, lubrication of bearings and joints, mechanical seals, gaskets, WHS checks and more, to ensure everything is functioning properly.
Best Practice Maintenance of Industrial Pumps
To avoid downtime, preventive pump maintenance should be planned into a periodic maintenance schedule.
A regular preventative maintenance schedule should be determined by types of pumps you have in your operations, the manufacturer’s guidelines provided in the pump IOM, and industry recognised best practices.
Your industrial pump specialist mechanic can determine the frequency and schedule necessary to effectively maintain your industrial pump system.
Preventative maintenance may be scheduled at designated intervals (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) or based on the number of hours run.
Performing a three-month inspection typically involves ensuring the foundation and hold-down bolts are tight, the mechanical seal is working properly, the oil is in good condition for continued use, and the pump and driver shafts remain in alignment.
Annual inspections consist of examining the pump capacity, pressure, and power. If you identify any issues in your pump’s performance, you may need to do a more involved inspection — possibly requiring disassembling and replacing any worn or damaged parts.
The Benefits of In-house Monitoring of Pump Performance
Employees who have regular contact with pump systems should be familiar with the normal operating characteristics of a pump – flow rate, pressure, temperature, power consumption, as well as how the pump sounds and feels. This familiarity will enable them to detect abnormal pump operations that require attention, investigation and correction, whilst simultaneously saving money and preventing costly failures and downtime.
For routine daily and weekly inspections, you should check for leaks, unusual noises or vibrations, oil level and condition, suction and discharge pressures, flow rate, and temperature, at a minimum.
The use of checklists and logs ensures a fully repeatable process ensuring important maintenance intervals are not missed. Logs can provide valuable insight and reveal a pattern before failure occurs enabling easier troubleshooting.
Environmental Conditions Can Impact Pump Performance
Consider environmental factors where the pump is installed. Exposure to extreme temperatures, dirt, dust, salt, water, chemicals, or high humidity and other environmental factors can all impact your pump’s maintenance requirements.
Corrective Pump Maintenance
Corrective pump maintenance is reactive maintenance that is conducted after a problem has arised and been identified and diagnosed, or the pump is experiencing breakdown or failure. Corrective industrial pump maintenance may involve pump diagnostics, urgent pump repairs, emergency on-site pump repairs, pump testing, pump redesign recommendations, pump spare parts replacement and WHS checks.
Skipping scheduled preventative maintenance is not recommended and is often the source of pump issues that require corrective maintenance, which can often be a lot more costly.
Hunter Pumps Industrial - Your Leading Turnkey Industry Specialist
Don’t set your pumps up for catastrophic failure. Contact Hunter Pumps Industrial to create a proactive preventative maintenance schedule for your industrial pump system.
For preventative pump maintenance, corrective pump maintenance, regular pump servicing, emergency repairs, callouts and diagnostics, our main service area spans most of the Hunter and Upper Hunter regions of NSW including Newcastle, Maitland, Cessnock, Dungog, Lake Macquarie, Mid-Coast NSW, Muswellbrook, Port Stephens, Singleton, and beyond.
