Turn Down the Pressure

If you're not looking at lowering at lowering the psi in your compressed air system, you're probably throwing away money for no reason. 

(If you're okay with doing that, please email me, and I'll send you my paypal account).  

Every 2 psi increase in pressure over 100 psi raises the energy costs to run your compressor 1%.  The average cost of electricity in Florida (in 2013 up to August) is 10.29 cents per kW/hr.  If your business runs a 60 hour workweek, which is common, then on average it costs $239.59 to run one horsepower for a whole year.


If you've got a body shop with a 5hp compressor, that's no big deal.  It costs about $1200 per year to run it, so you might save $300 per year turning down your 5hp piston from 175 psi to 125 psi.  That's actually pretty good, for just changing a $40 pressure switch.

Let's look a typical rotary screw application.  A pretty typical installation would be 20 hp and the machine would cut off at 125 psi.  It costs about $4792 to run per year.  Normally no more than 90 psi is needed, and realistically with a few fixes, we could turn down their pressure to 100 psi.  That would save them 12.5%, which is $600 per year.  Sometimes no modifications are needed; all it takes is just to adjust the pressure in the controller or adjust a pressure switch. 


I'll give you a real world experience that we just ran into this week:

Our customer is starting up a new grain mill.  The manufacturer of the mill equipment specified they wanted a 60 hp compressor that produced 160 psi.  In our experience we have never seen a mill that needed over 100 psi - most mill equipment needs 90 psi or less.  We emailed the manufacturer and asked them why they wanted 160 psi, and they said the machine only needs 88 psi, but they recommend 160 psi to their customers, because they're worried about pressure drop!! 

This particular customer pays 15 cents per kW/hr and runs 5 days per week, 3 full shifts, so it costs them about $42,120 per year to run a 60hp compressor.  Because they only need 88 psi at the equipment, they can run the compressor at 110 psi - that saves $10,530 per year! 

By asking one question we saved them over $10,000 per year.  With a properly designed air system, they can probably drop the psi down to 100 and save even more.

Now let me ask you one question:  Why aren't you looking at reducing your system pressure right now?

We can help.  We can offer many different ways for you to achieve these energy savings with no effect on your production.  Please call us to examine your air system - what are you waiting for?

First grid-scale compressed air battery now operational

We've always said that compressed air is the 4th Utility.  Now it looks like it can be the 1st and the 4th.

SustainX has found a way to make compressed air a green and sustainable storage solution for electrical generation.

"The 1.5-megawatt ICAES system is located at SustainX headquarters in Seabrook, New Hampshire. It takes electricity from the grid and uses it to drive a motor that compresses air and stores it isothermally, or at near-constant temperature. To do so it captures the heat produced during compression, traps it in water, and stores the warmed air-water mixture in pipes. When electricity is needed back on the grid, the process reverses and the air expands, driving a generator. No fossil fuel is needed to reheat the air and no emissions are produced, making ICAES a safe and sustainable energy storage solution."

"The system can be scaled in both power (megawatts) and energy (megawatt-hours) depending on the application, and can be located where needed thanks to its use of standard pipeline storage and clean, emission-free operation. Because it's based on proven mechanical principles and mature industrial components, the system has a 20-year operating life with a very low levelized cost of energy, enabling cost-effective, large-scale storage of electricity. Unlike chemical battery systems, ICAES performance does not degrade over its lifetime or need frequent replacement. No hazardous materials are used.

SustainX ICAES technology is a significant improvement over conventional compressed air energy storage (CAES) systems, which have existed since the 1970s. CAES systems burn fossil fuel and are greatly limited by the need for specific geological locations (i.e. caverns) for air storage -- as well as substantial investments in time and money. Because of these limitations, there are only two such installations worldwide. SustainX's ICAES is the first megawatt-scale compressed air energy storage system built anywhere since 1991, and represents an opportunity to expand the availability and use of this bulk energy storage method."

Full story here.

It looks like the key breakthrough is in the way they do their heat exchanging.  Normally when you compress air, a large amount of energy is lost as heat.  It looks like they've found a way to capture the heat of compression in a very efficient and sustainable manner.  You can read the science behind it here.

SustainX isn't the only one who can capture the heat of compression and put it to use.  Kaeser Compressors have an energy recovery option to capture this heat, as well.  You can download the brochure on it here.  If you're interested, contact us, and our experts will help you decide if this is right for your facility.

It Pays to Meter Your Compressed Air

A picture is worth a thousand words:

A flow meter can save you thousands of dollars.

It's that simple.

For more information, please call us.