There’s no doubt that downtime is costly and needs to be minimized. Not only do you have to count the operator wages, but overtime hours should also be considered, as well as any expedited shipping fees to ensure your orders arrive as quickly as possible. In the pulp and paper manufacturing industry, for instance, that could cost as much as $25,000 an hour, or even more!

Who wants to pay that cost?

Of course, it’s not difficult to minimize downtime in your facility. You should note the age of your equipment. If it has a Dynamatic nameplate, it’s generally good for several decades, but we admit, our products are mechanical and can fail. The age of your Dynamatic unit may not be readily seen on a name plate, but by the looks of it, you should be able to tell if it’s more seasoned. If you have a Dynamatic unit, you can always send us an email at sales@dynamatic.com or call us at (262) 554-7977 with your model number and we can look up the age!

Human error can cause down time, too. What if a forklift driver hits your equipment and causes a failure? Accidents do happen.

Basic Maintenance Is Key

Or, if you haven’t kept up with regular, preventative maintenance on your eddy current product, failures are bound to happen sooner than later. Preventative maintenance is fairly simple on an eddy current drive. We recommend that you lubricate the bearings every six months or so, and regularly check for dirt and debris in and around your unit.

Do You Have a Spare?

Chances are, once you’ve calculated downtime costs, you’d realize it is far more expensive than keeping a spare eddy current product on your warehouse shelf.

Imagine you’re a pulp and paper company and your variable speed drive went down due to a mechanical failure. Turnaround time, including shipping, could be two weeks. As an example, two weeks at $25,000 an hour is a whopping $8.4 million!! Granted, that’s a bit of an exaggerated example, but with all costs calculated, it wouldn’t be that far-fetched.

A typical eddy current drive used in the pulp and paper industry could cost thousands of dollars, depending on the required application. That’s a drop in the bucket compared the potential millions if your production had to be down for several weeks.

Due to the expansive variations of our customer’s requirements, DSI/Dynamatic cannot guarantee to have your specific product available at the exact time of need. That’s why we feel it’s critical that you consider putting identical equipment on your shelf as a spare.

As we connect with each of our customers or potential customers personally, we’re making sure they are aware of the opportunity to save a future headache. We take into consideration our customers’ best interest when we offer a spare product. We want to eliminate the problematic down time, so when mechanical failures or accidents happen, you won’t be caught with a large expense.

Please reach out to DSI/Dynamatic today to get more information about a spare product!