By analyzing and monitoring chemical properties of steam and water, a steam and water analysis system ensures you are protecting the generation assets in your plant. Maintaining this system is critical to ensuring accurate results from grab sample and sample panel data. Here’s what you need to know about implementing a regular maintenance schedule for your utility’s SWAS.

Common challenges in Maintaining SWAS Equipment

From pressure to flow rate, maintaining accurate, real-time data is critical to identifying and analyzing chemical properties that will protect your utility’s equipment, personnel and output. The technical design specification is the first step in designing a SWAS that operates accurately, reliably and safely for your plant’s conditions.

Developing a regular maintenance plan is the final step in ensuring your system continues to function optimally after implementation. But in today’s world, utility plants are operating under stressors that can make it challenging to properly maintain their SWAS.

If plants wrongly assume that a disastrous equipment failure won’t – or can’t – happen to them, maintenance may be put off until something goes wrong.

In many plants, maintenance gets tacked on to staffs’ already strained workload. Many plants have even cut staff, leaving existing operators and technicians feeling overwhelmed with the increased demand on their time and expertise. The pressure to maximize uptime and minimize downtime is higher than ever, with simultaneous expectations to minimize risk and increase equipment life expectancy.

Operating your utility plant at peak efficiency while safeguarding equipment and personnel is critical, but how can you do it all? The answer: Peace of mind from a SWAS maintenance expert.

The Benefits of Regular SWAS Maintenance

Fewer shutdowns. Maintenance helps increase sampling repeatability and reduce upset conditions, making it easier to diagnose issues and avoid shutting down the unit to increase uptime.

Reduced costs. Plants can save money on unplanned downtime, unexpected service and travel costs, and equipment costs.

Less downtime. Some plants report that monthly maintenance can lead to up to 95% fewer call-outs, which helps prevent equipment downtime.

Proactive response. Avoid reactive maintenance and proactively identify issues before they cause larger, more dangerous and more expensive problems.

Regulatory compliance. Maintenance can help ensure your utility plant maintains compliance with regulatory statues and industry guidelines, such as EPRI, ASTM D5540, ASME PTC 19.11, VGB and IAPWS.

Less stress. Outsourcing maintenance frees up your staff to handle other critical tasks and allows them to focus on core job responsibilities.

• Maintenance operators and supervisors get the assurance they need that if anything happens with their equipment, it will be fixed immediately by trained experts.
• Plant managers know the SWAS is delivering the right analytics so they can do their job properly. Regular maintenance ensures the sampling equipment continues to operate at peak performance long after installation.
• Plant technicians benefit from expert help to ensure the equipment continues to run smoothly.

Expert advice. When you work with an expert in the industry, you get a partner that sees the entire system and how its interrelated to ensure all aspects of the unit are working properly – not just the analyzers.

See how monthly maintenance could help your utility. Contact us at +1-262-567-7256, or complete our online contact form for more information.