Refinery Reduces Product Replacement Costs by $220K

Challenge

A maintenance manager at one of the largest petroleum refiners in the U.S. noticed that many of their duct heaters were failing at an alarming rate. Each location has hundreds of industrial duct heaters that provide forced flow heat convection. It had become the number one maintenance issue at this location.

Solution

This company had been a long-time customer of Valin’s. The maintenance manager contacted his local Valin account manager to place yet another order of duct heaters. The rate of consumption of these relatively expensive heaters did not go un-noticed by the account manager, so he asked what was going on. He said he did not know why they were failing, so the account manager asked if he could visit the site to see if he could find the problem. The maintenance manager was only too happy to have him investigate.

The site visit unveiled improper termination torqueing procedures and improper fusing within the control panel. Valin’s account manager agreed to provide training to their plant personnel on how to torque the nuts on the heater and how to fuse with the control panel once the new duct heaters arrived.

Customer Benefits

The refinery was spending approximately $220,000 each year on prematurely failing duct heaters and was unaware of a serious training issue with their installation technicians. Valin’s technical specialist was able to identify the issue with one simple site visit. Not only are their new duct heaters lasting longer – saving the refinery hundreds of thousands of dollars – but the maintenance team’s time has now been freed up to spend on more crucial issues.