3 Simple Steps to Reducing the Cost of Industrial Machine Lubrication Labor Without Sacrificing Quality

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3 Simple Steps to Reducing the Cost of Industrial Machine Lubrication Labor Without Sacrificing Quality

Looking for some areas where time can be removed from routine work? Try reducing grease related tasks. These generally occupy about half of the technicians work load. Some of this is unavoidable – such as semi-annual coupling purges and annually changes. Most, however, can be done with much better efficiency than we are often expect.

Take motor lubrication for example. If a medium size plant has 1000 motors with lubricated bearings, and one assumes that 75% of those are large enough, or critical enough to lubricate, then there is 750 that required attention twice per year. Following textbook methods, it takes a minimum of 30 minutes to lubricate each motor, and at twice per year then management is looking at 750 hours dedicated to motor lubrication. Unfortunately, 90% of housings will not cooperate with the textbook case and the technician ends up driving grease into the windings anyway.

Since the ‘textbook’ method is not better at preventing grease intrusion into the windings than a simple 3 minutes, quantity-specific charge, replace the 750 hours with 75 minutes of highly defined and quantity specific application of grease. This requires the use of a $250 grease meter, and for an engineer to make a calculation about the required volume (which can be done quickly using the LubeCoach), and provide that information to a technician on a route sheet.

Result: grease supplied to motors for 0.16% of the amount of required time, and with the same exact risk to the motor windings. One could be generous and allow for 5 minutes per bearing, and still be ridiculously below the textbook suggestion.

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