In decades past, maintenance professionals often assumed that the boiler equipment was sturdy enough to withstand years without checkups. In fact, it was commonplace for facility managers and maintenance workers to take the boilers off their “to-do” lists. However, today’s standards do not allow for this attitude. Although there are some exceptions, National Boiler Codes require facilities to complete inspections and registration for boilers annually.
As the market continues to demand more efficient equipment, like mod-con boilers, facility managers should consider inspecting boilers and burners twice as often or more. While it can seem time-consuming to conduct these scans more frequently, doing so can save your facility money. Learn how WSI’s boiler lifecycle management can save you money.
Prevent Shutdowns
While codes require you to check your boilers every year, it doesn’t take 12 months for build-up and other damage to occur. During daily operations, your equipment may start cracking from thermal fatigue, suffer from the infamous high-temperature creep, or see corrosion problems. Some boilers may even have flame impingement damage. The key to keeping these nuisances at bay is to catch them early.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to catch these issues if you aren’t actively checking for them. By the time a complication arises, the necessary repairs may entail a suspension in building or factory operations. While that is a costly enough concept to consider, what if damage is so severe that it requires replacing the boiler altogether?
If you want to prevent expensive equipment shutdowns, it’s important to check your boilers and burners regularly. Spot potential problems before they have a chance to cause significant losses.
Run More Efficiently
In addition to avoiding costly shutdowns, implementing boiler lifecycle management techniques keep your energy costs to a minimum. Boilers are notorious for their tendency to use a lot of energy. Regular checkups and routine monitoring can significantly reduce these costs.
What to Check
Since boilers are large and bulky with many essential parts, it can be hard to know where to start. Compile a checklist to walk you through each inspection. Make sure to record what you see and compare it to previous measurements. This practice can help you catch problems early.
Ensure the following items are on your checklist:
Water quality
Piping
Controls
Venting
Combustion air
Electrical systems
Fuel-supply piping
Verify that each of these parts functions appropriately and efficiently to keep your employees safe and your bottom line in good shape.
Our Solutions: WSI’s Boiler Lifecycle Management Can Save You Money
If all of this sounds like more than you want to handle by yourself, don’t let that get in the way of proper maintenance. WSI has solutions for your boiler. From construction and overhaul to preventative maintenance, we can ensure that your system is in money-saving shape.
We have over 30 years of experience in helping facilities like yours. Our solutions are ASME and NCIC certified and provide optimal protection.
Oil and gas companies, petrochemical refineries, and nuclear facilities must often contract welding services to deliver planned and emergency response solutions or repairs. In these highly technical energy markets, not any welding provider will do. Enhanced safety, superior performance, decreased costs, and on-time scheduled completion are all benefits that only an experienced firm can deliver. WSI has emerged as a leading provider of specialty welding solutions, offering technologically advanced maintenance, repair, and overhaul services for energy markets and beyond. Learn how WSI’s custom welding solutions generate value.
WSI’s Hot Pulse Wire innovation in welding was born out of a desire to deliver both the highest levels of quality and productivity. By adapting Hot Pulse Wire technology to a GTAW welding process and machine control, WSI can generate significant gains in application access, safety, weld quality and weld productivity.
As a total solutions provider, WSI is experienced in enhancing value by developing highly specialized processes to meet each customer’s specific needs, even when it requires the modification of current methods or the development of completely new techniques. Our engineers deploy to sites, evaluate challenges, and blend traditional weld methods and automated technologies to give customers better and more efficient outcomes.
Whether working on application-critical repairs or planned maintenance interventions, WSI’s creative and experienced engineers develop customer specific solutions that are, in many cases, patented or IP protected, providing greater advantages over the generic solutions competing specialty welders rely upon. Groundbreaking technologies, new weld specifications, and innovative applications are all hallmarks of our brand. Through our comprehensive custom solutions, customers enjoy decreased facility downtime, consistent, predictable automated processes, increased productivity, and superior quality.
Automated welding is the preferred method under these conditions, and WSI has developed HotPulse automated welding technology that improves security by improving the welding tools themselves. Through decades of expertise in welding, metallurgy, and process implementation, we have developed efficient and powerful products that will keep you and your employees safe. For welding, there is no better choice for workplace safety than the HotPulse welding process.
HotPulseoffers significant deposit quality and mechanical improvements over the standard manual and machine welding techniques, and it lowers risks commonly associated with access constraints and high pre-heat temperatures coupled with machine control. Even in the best companies, welding circumstances can’t always be ideal, so HotPulse technology offers safety measures to protect you and your team, regardless of the task at hand.
WSI’s patent-pending technology fosters higher productivity and improved quality in the finished product. HotPulse creates transitional oscillation at a frequency synchronized to the wire feed and travel speed of the weld, which in turn affects the behavior of the weld puddle, producing the desired result from the welding process.
It is no surprise that high-risk environments such as nuclear plants trust the unique and secure process that WSI offers. When working in these high dose areas under strict schedules, you can trust the HotPulse welding process to get the job done. Shock, fume inhalation, and fire are high risks in many welding situations, but especially so in these environments. By adapting a HotPulse Wire to a GTAW welding process, WSI can help you get any job completed safely and quickly.
It’s also important to note that we at WSI understand how daunting it is to make a change in tools or procedures. To overhaul a welding system and acquire the proper documentation and approval require time you probably don’t have. That’s why we have made the benefits of our technology accessible without involving extensive changes to your existing equipment, and you don’t need to change your WPS/PQR documentation to stay in compliance.
Our team is testing these equipment systems every day—constantly working to find new design repair solutions. Our aim is to adapt to the needs of your project at a moment’s notice.
Our world is indisputably dependent on petroleum based products. As a result, refinery turnarounds are both critical and necessary to ensure the safe operation of refineries. The operators and service suppliers are obliged to temporarily halt all or most refinery operations for a prolonged duration. Depending on the scope of the maintenance or renovation project, a turnaround can last up to several months. During this time, the unexpected shutdown of a neighboring refinery can result in critical supply and demand restrictions. Learn more on why Tesoro awards WSI for innovation and value delivery.
Tesoro Corporation is an independent refiner and marketer of petroleum products, supported by thousands of suppliers every year across its refining, logistical, and marketing operations. Through its subsidiaries, Tesoro operates seven refineries in the western United States with a combined capacity of over 895,000 barrels per day.
Given that turnarounds present zero room for error and very little room for delays, Tesoro Corporation exercises extra discretion in choosing its partners. For that reason, Tesoro turned to WSI in October of 2015 to take on a particularly sensitive project: the rectification of significant corrosion uncovered during turnaround on the Wilmington Delayed Coker Unit (DCU) of Tesoro’s Los Angeles Refinery. Tesoro leadership described the situationas follows:
“Originally the process included a visual inspection of the tower in addition to replacing 28 trays. Inspection of the tower however revealed that significant weld repairs would be required to ensure continued reliable and safe operation of the tower. On short notice, WSI agreed to support this monumental effort, and without hesitation they began assisting in aggressive planning efforts with Tesoro personnel. They quickly mobilized the necessary resources, personnel and equipment effectively, consistent with the demands of the turnaround schedule. Additionally, WSI collaborated with the other contractors already onsite who were working on other jobs in the tower. Although WSI was given short notice and limited time available to plan, their coordination of all the activities was executed efficiently, without any safety or environmental issues, and ahead of schedule. The work done by WSI’s 2015 was invaluable to Tesoro.”
In fact, the work proved to be so instrumental to the success of reinstatement of the Los Angeles refinery, one year later, CEO Greg Goff personally presented WSI with an award for its Innovation and Value Delivery at the first annual Tesoro Supplier Recognition Awards in San Antonio, TX.
Nominated by the Tesoro Turnaround Planning and Execution group, WSI’s performance ultimately outranked thousands of suppliers, and hundreds of nominations submitted for review.
“We conduct our business in an intentional and proactive way to maximize the creation of value with our stakeholders,” said CJ Warner, Executive Vice President of Operations at Tesoro. “It is critical to our continued growth that we have reliable, highly capable, and trusted suppliers and contractors who share our core values and drive for superior execution.”
In that spirit, Tesoro honored twelve additional suppliers with awards across its categories of Safety, Innovation and Value Delivery, Shared Value; and Small, Disadvantaged, or Diverse Business—at the event attended by nearly two-hundred employees from eighty supplier firms.
WSI is a global provider of welding solutions and highly engineered services dedicated to building and enhancing the world’s infrastructure. We prioritize unmatched service and support from the team that so seamlessly embodied Tesoro’s shared ideals this past year.
