Reduce Unplanned Downtime with Utilities Asset Case Studies

Boiler Feed Water Pumps

Most industrial pumps operate at less than half of their potential efficiency, usually due to poor operating conditions and practices that can be impossible to pinpoint with traditional approaches to maintenance.

  • Pumps consume 25% of all industrial energy
  • Pumps typically operate at 40% efficiency
  • Inefficiency costs $500,000 on average over the pump’s lifespan

Cooling Towers

Cooling towers are hard to reach and hard to monitor, so many maintenance pros miss key indicators of imminent failure. Tower failure can have downstream impacts on almost all production processes.

  • $1,000/hour downtime cost 
  • $50,000 in equipment costs per failure
  • $100,000+ cost savings per avoided failure

Induced/Forced Draft Fans

Route-based maintenance doesn’t capture the full picture of ID/FD fan health. These fans are large, putting relatively small data anomalies lower on the priority list — but they are often a warning sign of imminent failure.

  • Up to $20,000/hour downtime cost
  • $250,000 in equipment costs per failure
  • $300,000+ cost savings per avoided failure

“Whether evaluating downtime hours avoided or dollars saved, our team and KCF’s joint efforts have made a strong impact in 2022. In 2023, as we expand KCF’s technology to 15 new Covanta locations, we look forward to growing our downtime avoidance.”

Eric Way, Maintenance Mechanic at Covanta

Why KCF

$4B
customer savings

75k
hours of prevented downtime

24/7
hours of monitoring

Optimize Your Utilities Performance

Energy producers can rise to meet ever-increasing grid demands and competitive pressure by reducing unplanned downtime, diagnosing the root cause of machine failures, and achieving ideal operating conditions with the SMARTdiagnostics machine health optimization platform.

Download the 2022 KCF Guide to learn more about optimizing your facility’s performance today.

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How Our Utilities Machine Health Optimization Platform Works

Manufacturers and producers in the energy sector have to keep a watchful eye on O&M costs, and every machine failure can cause that number to creep up. Traditional route- or time-based monitoring doesn’t capture smaller data anomalies that can alert your team to imminent failure before it’s too late.

SMARTdiagnostics, our comprehensive machine health platform, wirelessly and continuously transmits machine health data to a central database from individual monitoring points on your assets. Its advanced analytics capabilities get to the root cause of machine health issues, and its human-in-the-loop architecture ensures compliance and correct action.

Achieve 3.6x more asset coverage with the only comprehensive platform to ingest Oil, MCSA, Pressure, Vibration, Legacy IEPE sensors, and Ultrasound into
one software platform.

Improve Thermal Performance

Thermal losses in a combined-cycle plant can have a serious impact on overall plant efficiency. Just one valve out of place can result in several megawatts of lost energy production capacity.

Thermal loss detection and documentation can be a time-consuming, manual task. Continuous remote monitoring via pressure and temperature sensors means you’ll know right away if heat rate losses are affecting your efficiency — not days or weeks after something goes wrong.

Replace time-based maintenance with as-needed maintenance.

Prioritize, Plan, Prevent

Continuous remote monitoring, supported by AI-driven root cause analysis, means that you can prioritize maintenance activities based on criticality instead of taking machines out of service based on a best guess. SMARTdiagnostics will help you determine whether your asset issues need immediate attention or if they can wait for a better maintenance window.

In some cases, damaging operations detected by SMARTdiagnostics can even be corrected without taking equipment offline, preventing lock-out/tag-outs and loss of revenue.

Prioritize maintenance activities based on criticality instead of best guesses.

“By being able to keep the pump running at full load… (we realized an) enormous amount of savings from this one issue that we identified alone.”

Senior Innovation Manager

KCF Technologies Gives Energy Facilities a Competitive Edge

Gain access to continuous monitoring and a team of engineers with a wealth of utilities industry experience in asset health monitoring, root cause analysis, and problem-solving.

Our machine health optimization platform was designed for manufacturers with tough asset challenges that traditional monitoring can’t solve. We’ll help you prevent unplanned downtime and increase productivity, efficiency, and revenue.

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