One of our distributors met with a company that manufactures outdoor living products. They were looking to convert the heat used in their production lines from natural gas to electric heat. In their process, air is warmed to enhance the application of coatings to various materials. The warming of the air and preheating of the material improves the adhesion of the coatings and speeds up drying and curing time. The company wanted to test the use of electric heat on one production line before converting all lines. This approach would allow for system refinement before making a complete changeover.
The company wanted a system that was movable, so we proposed a blower, heater, and controller combination, all plumbed together on a mobile skid that could be moved around easily and safely with a fork truck. This would be a plug-and-play solution where they could position the unit and simply push the start button. Using our heater and controller would have allowed them to achieve precise and repeatable temperatures. Instead of purchasing our complete system, they expressed the wish to design their own control system to use with our heater in an effort to save some money.
Even though they did not necessarily have the people or bandwidth to do it, they purchased only the heater and tried to create their own system. After one month, they needed to purchase the same heater again, and then a few weeks after that, they reached out to our distributor for help. After his visit, he shared photos of the process they had created. They were transitioning from a 4” blower exhaust to an 8” heater and then to a 3” tube, which delivered the heated air to the application. The connections between the blower, the heater, and the process air tube looked like someone had hobbled them together, beating sheet metal into shape and holding it in place with sheet metal screws. To make the unit portable, they mounted it on an old shipping pallet.
The first heater had already failed, and the second was beginning to break down. The airflow was cheating and not mixing into the heater correctly. The 4” of airflow was trying to shoot right down the center. In addition, the heat going from an 8” exhaust to a 3” tube was creating back pressure that the blower simply could not handle—and the blower was also having issues. Finally, they were not monitoring the thermocouples located at the exhaust of the heater as instructed. Instead, they were monitoring the temperature downstream. And, to make matters worse, they admitted that as they moved and set up the system, the operators were not even plugging in or using the thermocouples.
In the short term, the customer needed to order another heater so they would have a backup. They could not afford to have the line go down and production stop due to heater failure. Once again, we proposed our original solution with our controller on a skidded system, which they agreed to. Our turnaround time was 10-12 weeks, which is very reasonable for a custom system. In the meantime, they would need to have an operator stay by the existing setup and monitor the temperature to avoid failure.
Have you ever heard the saying “buy once, cry once?” If the customer had spent a little money upfront, instead of trying to go the cheap route and cobbling together their own solution, they would have avoided the need to continually replace equipment and the lost revenue due to downtime. Not to mention the need (and expense) to have an operator stand by the system to monitor it and make sure it did not overheat, while they waited for our solution to arrive.
TUTCO Farnam is a leader in electrification. If we have not already worked on an application like yours, we have done one very similar and can provide the expert guidance to help you make the jump to electric heat.
