EXAIR’s Free Efficiency Lab – How Much Money Can It Save You?

In many of my blogs, I talk about specific products benefits or applications, but this week I want to talk about a service that EXAIR provides to our customers: Efficiency Labs. The Efficiency Lab is comprehensive study of your current blow off. You can ship your current blow off to our facility. We can test it with our calibrated equipment and record your current product characteristics. Our most popular efficiency lab is testing home made blow offs. These are blow offs made from copper tubes, thumb guns with nozzles removed, or drilled pipe. These blow offs can get the job done, but they are noisy, wasteful and dangerous. Every compressed air expert knows that these blow offs need replaced, but sometimes it may difficult to decide which nozzle to use. By sending us your current blow off product(s) we can measure the force, flow, and noise of the blow off and provide a comprehensive report. This report, in most cases, compares your current setup against what EXAIR we would recommend to save compressed air, lower noise levels and maintain performance.

 In addition to providing a blow off suggestion, EXAIR’s efficiency lab can identify your energy cost for these blow offs. The standard industrial cost for compressed air is $0.25 per 1000 standard cubic feet. At first glance that might not seem like much, but it can add up. This week I did an efficiency lab for a customer that used 1/4 ID copper tube as their home made blow off.

open copper tube
This 1/4″ Open Blow off uses 30.8 SCFM of compressed air.

This small open tube ran continuously for 10 hours per day five days a week.

To run this tube, cost a company $1,175 per year. The tube would flow 30.8 SCFM of compressed air when fed with 80 PSIG. By installing an EXAIR Super Air Nozzle,  part number 1100, the company could save 16.8 SCFM of compressed air and $650 per year. Once again $650 may not seem like much, but they used up to (40) of these open blow offs depending on what part they ran. Replacing all (40) of these blow offs saves $26,000 per year at a capital investment of $2,880 for (40) 1100-9212, Super Air Nozzle with 12 inch stay set hose. That would be a simple ROI of 72 days.

That ROI is only taking into account compressed air cost. Additionally, the 1100 Super Air Nozzle will reduce noise by 28 dBA and it complies with OSHA Standard CFR 1910.242(b) for dead end pressure.

We have found that our customers all have unique setups which greatly vary the values of their particular blow off. Even if customers have the same 1/4″ tube, the way they implement it can greatly affect its performance. Variations in inlet pressure, length, diameter tolerance and even what they used to cut it to length can have an impact on how much air it will consume. If you want to know for certain how much air and money you can save, use our free Efficiency Lab service.

EXAIR can save a lot for you!

Dave Woerner
Engineer, BSME
EXAIR Corporation