TULSA, Okla. — I wanted to dedicate my column this month to something near and dear to my heart: steam management and steam trap maintenance.
I know this has probably been written on quite a bit; however, you can’t talk about it enough when running a laundry.
There are many pieces of equipment or procedures that are unique to the laundry business. A boiler and steam traps are not among them.
The first boiler for manufacturing was built in 1679, and steam boilers are still used in virtually every manufacturing process, no matter what is being made. There is a wealth of knowledge to be found on this subject, and every steam equipment manufacturer has videos or documents about their products that you can view online or even sign up for classes.
Issues with your steam system will manifest in some areas of a laundry more than others, such as ironers, garment finishing tunnels or hot water steam bundles.
I’ll try to keep this pretty basic. You have two main pieces to this puzzle:
- Boiler. Where you turn water to steam.
- Steam trap. When steam cools and turns back to water, your steam trap removes that water or condensate and sends it back to your boiler feedwater tank to start the process all over again.
Pretty simple process. A tried-and-true technology. It doesn’t matter what item you are heating. It all works the same.
But this simple process can cost a company a lot of money and headaches when it doesn’t work correctly.
There are some telltale signs that your system isn’t working correctly, such as if you have steam blowing up out of your feedwater tank. You will always have smoke coming up out of this tank; however, if it is blowing with some pressure on it, you have leaking steam traps.
I was told once that if your exhaust pipe coming out of your roof has a gap of maybe a few inches before you see the smoke, that’s a pretty good indication of a problem. The smoke should be kind of lazily coming out of the tank.
Another place that you will see an issue is at your garment finisher or steam tunnel. When you start your machine and water blows out of the steam jets, you have a steam trap issue. I have seen this also happen if you have badly leaking traps somewhere in your system that create too much back pressure for your trap to work correctly or remove the water.
For your system to work properly, there shouldn’t be any back pressure on the condensate side of your trap.
Steam coils for dryers, heaters or hot water steam bundles can also give you grief when you have an issue. The leading cause of failures on coils is that the steam trap is not removing the condensate from the machine. When this happens, the incoming steam will try and heat up this condensate in the coils, making loud banging noises. It can cause breaks in the coils.
How do you stop from having these issues? The first item is to understand that steam traps are not made to last forever. They must be rebuilt every three to five years or replaced. More often than that if you are not treating your boiler correctly.
I prefer rebuilding to replacing because, at times, you can create pipe leaks when replacing steam traps on older machines. If you have a good rebuild process and always use anti-seizing compounds when you put a steam trap together, this usually goes smoothly and fast. However, sometimes a trap can’t be rebuilt. I have seen them corrode and recently had one with a hole in the body.
There are companies that will come and check out your steam system and even replace your traps. The natural gas provider for one of our locations offers a rebate for each changed trap.
It is also good to remember that machinery is designed to use clean, dry steam. You should try to remove as much water as possible from the steam before you use it. Steam traps at the end of steam headers or just before machines can really help reduce the amount of water you send to your heating device.
These are our steps to help combat this:
- Monthly steam trap temperature checks. The incoming should be above 300 F (depending on your steam pressure). The trap exhaust should be below 220 F since it should just be condensate. Using infrared scanners helps with this since many times traps are not easily accessible.
- Monitor ironer chest temperature and keep a history. A cooler than normal temperature can indicate a plugged trap or one leaking straight through.
- Have a planned schedule to rebuild or replace steam traps every three years no matter what. As the orifice in a steam trap wears, it allows steam to be exhausted continually from the trap. This is a relatively small, but constant, amount. However, if your laundry has 20-50 steam traps, those small leaks become pure steam blowing out of the top of your roof.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].
