How often does my air compressor need to be serviced?

You service and maintain your car, your central heating and cooling, why wouldn’t you do the same with your compressor? But how often does your air compressor need to be serviced?

Air Compressor Service

There are things you can do yourself to keep your compressor running in tip-top shape, and other things a service technician should dig in to. Knowing the early signs of wear and tear, understanding your product’s specifications and usability guidelines, and knowing when it’s prudent to call in repairs are skills that could save you a lot of time, effort, and money in the long term.

Service early

It’s always better to call in service than it is to call in for repairs, especially for core machinery such as air compressors that serve multiple applications.

There are many benefits of calling service team early over leaving the machinery until it breakout. Some of those benefits are:

1. By calling in service when you spot signs rather than when you need it immediately, you’ll be able to calculate the timeline of repairs that suit you. Repair times should not be during times of high use, to maximize efficiency and lower possible downtime.

2. Compressed Air ends, when not maintained can result in a catastrophic shutdown. A check by qualified servicemen and possible refurbishment should be considered within the prescribed lifetime of the air end.

3. You should prevent the risk of plant shutdown while you wait for core machinery to be repaired. A critical machine going offline can be a disastrous occurrence, especially during high workloads or in an industry with strict and competitive deadlines to beat.

4. Air compressors in particular work off efficiency. While an air compressor may be ‘working’ effectively, leaks and other routine maintenance-fixable things can use up 20-30% of your air flow, with an average of 19% across all tested. Over the first ten years of use, an air compressor’s initial capital cost and maintenance cost make up 18% and 7% of total expenditure, while energy accounts for a gigantic 73%. It is advisable to get a health checkup your system.

5. By servicing early, you’ll cut down air leaks that can reach as high as 40-50% loss of total air produced, and reduce your overall expenditure down significantly. The better maintained, the larger reduction (for 7% average costs) you’ll get your leakage (0.2-0.3 of 72% energy costs).

Know the signs

We talked about early signs. To know these signs, you must check your compressor manuals first, because it’s important to understand your air compressor. Check how long it recommends before servicing, as most petroleum-based compressors need changing every 500 hours or so, and synthetics around 2,000.

It’s perfectly ok for you to check for error messages on the unit’s controller, to check the oil temperature and the coolant levels, and to make sure the drains are functioning properly. Some compressors, like rotary screw compressors are more complicated and should be serviced and checked out regularly by a certified technician.

It won’t matter how prominent the signs are if you don’t know about the equipment you’re dealing with, or aren’t even checking your basic inbuilt warning signs often.

Excess moisture

Whenever an air compressor is running, it accumulates moisture that must be in some way reduced. If your compressor is producing excess condensation, it may be experiencing a fault in the automatic drain system.

Loud noises

CompAir compressors come with a sealed, in-built noise reduction chamber. If your compressor is beginning to make either:

Too much noise for usability standards is a symptom of vibration and can result in the failure of some moving parts.

Compressor sound is significantly louder than usual.

If there is extremely inconsistent noise or any rattling or similar noises. Then you may either have a broken component rattling around or a fault in the motor.

Breakers tripping frequently

Equipment tripping breakers can signify a multitude of things. Your first immediately check the electrical circuit powering the compressor, but if there’s no fault there and the system continues to trip breakers or blow fuses, you should call servicemen immediately.

High loss of pressure, or low overall air pressure

If your compressor is reporting no air pressure, you more than likely have a reporting problem (unless you truly do have zero). Simply having low air pressure is a mark of either reporting issues, wear and tear on internal or external parts, or sometimes a simple technical issue.

Sometimes this can be easily fixed, but if there is no significant and easy to spot the issue at hand, you’ll be racking up huge amounts of losses in energy costs to keep it running without one.

On/off unresponsive

If you can’t get the air compressor working in the first place, and you are not able to trace, what’s wrong with it. The first thing to do is to check the circuit and any obvious things, but if you can’t figure it out. It might be time for a repair.

Call experts (AirAudit)

If you’re experiencing any of these signs with your air compressor, or just want to make sure that you are getting the most efficient air compression possible, Contact AirAudit, we’ll take care of you. It’s why we’re here.