Why Preventive Maintenance of Air Compressors is Mandatory?

Large capital purchases, such as compressors, require careful planning and financial forecasting. After deducting the initial cost, many organizations must still pay to the principal. Although they usually include these line items in their budgets, they often forget to consider another key cost: annual maintenance. Although maintenance accounts for only 5% to 10% of the annual compressor-related costs, if you forget or delay maintenance, these costs may increase exponentially, resulting in unexpected and costly Downtime. Compared with the entire life cycle cost of compressor ownership, maintenance expenses are minimal.

Why Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance aims to discover and cease expensive repair costs and system downtime before mechanical failure spreads. This type of maintenance includes daily, weekly, monthly, monthly, quarterly or yearly inspections of all system components to ensure that everything is normal.

In some cases, preventive maintenance involves low-cost measures that can help avoid higher-cost situations. For example, when a slight crack is found in the compressor belt, immediately replacing the belt helps your company prevent sudden belt breakage, the compressor stops working, and stops production after the problem has been identified and measures taken. Steps necessary to restore the system to normal operation.

What if preventive maintenance is ignored?

Every manufacturer recommends preventive maintenance, but many companies are too busy to bother for maintenance. However, failing to perform recommended maintenance will affect more than the compressor itself, and problems will trickle down to all areas of your operation and will result in following issues to be dealt with:

• Repairing Cost

Maintenance aims to prevent any expensive repairs in the future, and the manufacturer recommends regular and preventive maintenance for some reason. Failure to perform proper maintenance may cause problems throughout the operation. Simple things such as increased oil retention may cause the compressor to block or overheat, affecting other equipment below the pipeline, resulting in expensive maintenance costs and a lot of downtime.

• Productivity Loss due to Downtime

If your operations experience severe downtime, you may be forced to find new delivery methods and pay higher fees for overnight shipping speeds, so as not to cause serious delays to customers. In addition, you will have to rush to order new parts in order to restart operations, which will result in a rapid increase in expedited shipping costs.

• Higher Utilities Cost

If proper maintenance is delayed, the utility cost of operating the compressed air system will increase significantly. In the long run, simple things like replacing filters at recommended intervals will help your compressed air system use energy efficiently, thereby saving utility costs. If you find that utility costs are increasing without increasing usage in the system, it may be time for maintenance.

• Rented Equipment Cost

If the entire system fails due to delayed proper maintenance, it is likely that new equipment will need to be rented to avoid a complete shutdown. These rental costs will increase rapidly, and every day you rely on the rental equipment to keep the system running, your business is bearing the rental costs.

• Reduced Efficiency

Overall, when the system is down, you must perform emergency maintenance on the entire system, and you will lose operational efficiency. Even if you can continue to work while performing maintenance, the system will not operate optimally, resulting in lost productivity and possible lost revenue.

It is therefore highly recommended to follow the regular and preventive maintenance procedures mentioned by your air compressor system provider, to ensure that you do not encounter any of these problems. Otherwise, you may end up losing more money on the air compressor.

Sakoon Pneumatics are experts in Compressed Air for 40 years. Sakoon offers Services Contracts, Compressor Health-Check Visits, and Genuine Replacement Parts for compressors of all brands. It has one of the best Air-End Refurbishment facilities in Pakistan. Moreover, given unexpected situations and peak-season demands, Sakoon offers Rental Fleet of variety of products related to Compressed Air Systems.