Maintenance costs and downtime significantly reduced

Background

Millboard is a family owned manufacturer of polyurethane decking boards for commercial and domestic usage. A typical place where their decking boards would be used would be in gardens of hotels and restaurants. The advantage of polyurethane decking boards over wooden decking boards is that they require no maintenance at all, whereas wooden decking requires oiling once a year. The main problem they were having was on the de-moulding line. Because the decking boards are ridged, the existing vacuum unit did not provide enough vacuum flow to cope with the leaking ridges and therefore the other cups were not picking the mould up. They were going through at least one of these existing vacuum units per year before pump failure.

Solution

The solution was the  Piab P5010 vacuum pump. The other vacuum unit had a built in blow off and built in vacuum switch. We offered our vacuum switch and blow off valve to compete with the other vacuum unit. The Piab solution with COAX® technology proved to be very reliable and productivity improved as downtime due to the other pump not coping with the leaks had been eliminated.

Result

The customer is enjoying the benefit of significantly reduced maintenance costs and lack of downtime. The customer is very satisfied with Piab’s 5 year warranty as it gives him peace of mind. The other vacuum unit offers a 1 year warranty. More importantly, the Piab solution is not failing to pick the product up. The cost of the other vacuum unit was approximately £450, there was one of these pumps per cup. The Piab unit with the vacuum switch and blow off valve was approximately £410. The Piab unit runs two cups. The savings for the customer is approximately £490 per year per unit. One of the other vacuum units fails per year and as these fail the customer will replace them with Piab pumps. The customer may try running four cups off the Piab units as this will save him even more costs.