Reliability Can Be Free

As work on the book Reliability is Green continues I am further amazed and impressed with some the case studies that are coming in that will be detailed throughout the book. Just yesterday I was contacted by a former RCM Blitz™ customer regarding some Blogs I had written on the subject. Turns out their site recently completed an exercise where whey completed an energy audit, and identified hundreds of individual energy saving tasks that if completed would result in a annual energy savings in excess of 1.5 million dollars! The most incredible part of this story is that none of the task identified required high level engineering experience or resources, just a good understanding of maintenance techniques and some proven reliability tools.

In simple terms, they identified leaks of all types, rotating equipment imbalance or misalignment, missing or inadequate insulation and operational energy saving opportunities based on their understanding of process functions. (Why are we heating our water to 190 F when our process requires 160F?) They used Ultrasonic Listening to identify leaks, IR Thermography to identify areas where insulation was needed, and vibration analysis along with Precision Alignment techniques to reduce vibration in rotating equipment.

In my eyes the only thing they did different that most facilities that are beginning to look for ways to reduce energy consumption; they quantified the potential value of each of the identified tasks and constructed a logical plan on how to complete the effort with minimal impact to operations. Needless to say this company has now become very serious in regard to the opportunity they now have across all of their facilities. What started out as a pilot project to help build experience in their PdM group and save some energy resulted in effort that proved Reliability is not only Green, it can also be free. The bottom line savings from this single project covered the investment cost of the PdM tools by a factor of larger than 10. Impressive results!