What no one tells you about life cycle cost of compressors?

The Life cycle cost, also called total cost of ownership, is the cost you pay for buying, maintaining and operating the equipment for its total life.

The LCC for compressed air includes everything from the initial equipment cost, installation cost and related maintenance costs which includes service & spares & power consumption cost.

However, it should be noted that LCC analysis to be done only after  productivity, reliability and safety aspects are met.

There are different types of energy costs which not only impact the profits, plant efficiency but as well quality of end product. In other words, these are the target opportunities which help to earn more by right prioritization.

Earning opportunities by optimizing the following:

• Load Power - Power consumed to generate compressed air at certain pressure with required flow.

• Unload Power* - Air compressor runs in Idle condition without generating any useful compressed air for internal process.

• Blow off losses* - Every time the machine has to go into idle conditions, it depressurizes and can lead to lose of valuable compressed air to atmosphere.

• Pressure drop* - Every 1 bar(g) increase in pressure consumes 7% more power and hence if there is a pressure drop in system we incur losses

• Air leakages* – As per study, the compressed air leakages in the plant can lead to approximate 10 - 30% of the compressed air energy and thus result in huge power losses coupled with operating losses.

* For highest earnings, stay tuned with our blogs.

Every industry aims to measure and reduce the unwarranted cost by adopting several best practices and latest technologies.

One such practice to quantify the compressed air leakages is No Load Test which can be done without any additional investment and can give you insights on potential savings in your plant. Our energy managers recommend the air leakage percent should always be less than 5% to run your plant at optimum energy levels. With this simple test, lot of money can be earned from the compressed air plant by focusing on air leakages.

Did you know Atlas Copco service team has already helped more than 60 customers to realize potential savings of around 1500kW (approx. 63M INR in energy costs) with this test in just two months.

However, in some cases making a minor additional investment to reduce a major portion of this cost will result in short payback and life long earnings.

Read our next blog to know what part of compressed air cost can be converted into earnings?