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When it comes to essential equipment like plate heat exchangers, maintenance is a hot topic. According to the 2022 Plant Engineering survey, eight in 10 industrial facilities currently run three or more maintenance programs with their equipment, with the top two strategies being preventative (38% of assets) and reactive (35% of assets).
While heat exchanger maintenance programs can vary greatly across industries and individual facilities, the worst strategy is not having one at all. A lack of proper maintenance can lead to poor heat exchanger function, resulting in lower efficiency, diminished product quality, higher energy use and even reduced safety.
At WCR, we pride ourselves on being a true maintenance partner for our heat exchanger customers, helping facilities respond rapidly to unexpected heat exchanger repairs and strategize for planned maintenance based on their individual production timelines and goals.
As Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.” Preventative maintenance is all about planning ahead and anticipating maintenance needs before issues arise and become urgent — and expensive. With plate heat exchangers, it’s important to implement preventative maintenance programs that optimize your facility’s planned outages or scheduled maintenance intervals to minimize downtime and maximize productivity.
With nine domestic service center locations, WCR is ready to support all your preventative heat exchanger maintenance needs, whether you have one unit or one hundred. After an initial no-cost site survey to assess the condition of individual equipment and measure the current performance of your heat exchangers, our trained experts will help develop a personalized maintenance plan that fits your facility’s outage schedule or intended start dates and accounts for the predicted lifespan of your heat exchangers.
Plus, WCR’s massive selection of American-made heat exchanger plates and gaskets ensures you have access to a broad scope of replacement parts readily available for preventative maintenance, including our convenient spare heat exchanger plate packs. Whether you manage an on-site inventory of heat exchanger replacement parts or take advantage of WCR’s off-site inventory management service, we have you covered with OEM-quality specified plates and gaskets for all makes and models of plate heat exchangers.
Unlike preventative maintenance, reactive maintenance typically involves responding after poor performance is observed or a breakdown occurs. While a reactive maintenance strategy can make sense for certain equipment, it isn’t the most ideal option for heat exchangers. In the rare cases that a heat exchanger is run to the point of failure, it can result in expensive, unplanned downtime and may even pose serious health and safety risks depending on the application.
Despite the best-laid plans, unexpected emergencies can and do happen. For plate heat exchangers, reactive maintenance is almost always driven by external or internal contamination. Such contamination can cause costly product losses very quickly, which is why it’s important to have a reliable heat exchanger maintenance provider ready to respond at a moment’s notice.
At WCR, we have 21 field service teams set up strategically across the United States with the ability to reach any destination within eight hours. Our heat exchanger service technicians have years of cross-brand knowledge and experience handling all models of plate heat exchangers, giving you peace of mind that your valuable heat exchangers are in good hands when reactive maintenance is required.
In today’s world of extended production lead times and international shipping delays, partnering with a domestic heat exchanger manufacturer and service provider can make all the difference in developing an effective maintenance strategy.
WCR is not only a reliable resource for spare heat exchanger parts and emergency service on-demand; we’re your trusted maintenance partner, helping you plan ahead with a proactive heat exchanger maintenance program that fits the unique needs of your facility.
Ready to get started? Contact our team to arrange a complimentary site survey and see how we can help you put a successful heat exchanger maintenance plan in place.
