Keep Industrial Fan Parts On Hand To Avoid Downtime

When you’re running industrial process operations, you don’t have time for downtime, and it can be very costly on top of that. But if something goes wrong and you don’t have spare industrial fan parts on your shelf, it can take weeks and even months to replace them, particularly if your fan is custom and especially in the current supply chain environment.

There are four critical industrial fan parts you can’t run without and we highly recommend having them on hand in case of emergency. It may feel like an extra expense up-front, but the time, trouble, and money you’ll save yourself is well worth the investment.

4 Critical Industrial Fan Parts to Stock as Backup

You wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) drive your car around without a spare tire. The concept is the same for four key industrial fan parts. If you have spare fan parts on hand, you’re back up in a jiffy. If not, they can stop you in your tracks and you could be idle for much longer than you can afford to be.

Industrial fans and blowers are heavy-duty industrial machinery with moving parts. The moving industrial fan parts require ongoing maintenance and monitoring to ensure that your process doesn’t go down. They are also the more likely culprits if it does. Here are the four components you should always keep on your shelf.

Industrial Fan Parts Connected to the Motor

The first industrial fan parts to consider are the components that connect the fan to the motor. You’ll determine the parts to keep in stock based on what kind of fan arrangement you have. If you’re using a belt-driven motor, you’ll need to have a set of fan belts on hand. If you have a direct-drive motor, you’ll need a backup coupling. These are components that will require replacement eventually, so keeping them on hand is really just a fan maintenance best practice in general.

Fan Bearings

Similarly, proper fan-bearing maintenance can help you get the most possible life out of your fan’s bearings, but no matter how well you maintain them, they do have a limited life, and you will need to replace them at some point. There are a number of factors, including vibration, grease, and temperature, that make fan bearing maintenance very important, and they also make failure more likely than some other components. We recommend having a full set of bearings on the shelf because if you do have a bearing failure, you want to replace the whole set, not just one.

Custom Fan Shaft

Your fan shaft is customized to your application, cut to size, and weighted according to the wheel type, footprint, components, and fan function. You wouldn’t want to be offline waiting for the manufacturer to make a custom industrial fan part that you could simply stock when you order and install the fan in the first place.

The Impeller – The Industrial Fan Part that Makes a Fan a Fan

When you picture an industrial fan in your head, you’re probably thinking of the impeller, which consists of blades and possibly a backplate, shroud, and stiffening rings. It’s the least likely of the four critical industrial fan parts to fail, but if it does, it has the longest lead time, because it’s another custom component. It’s much easier and faster to make a second impeller to spec than to replicate the custom component later in case of failure.

The Bottom Line on Stocking Backup Industrial Fan Parts

We highly recommend keeping all four of these major drive components – connection to the motor (coupling or belts), fan shaft, bearings, and fan wheel – on your shelf. If you don’t, you could be waiting up to 12 weeks to source them from the manufacturer in the event that you go down. We don’t know many manufacturers who have that kind of time or money to spare. When you’re prepared with backup industrial fan parts, you can replace them quickly and get right back up and running.

Hear it from an Application Engineer

Chet White, Senior Application Engineer and Sales Manager, shows all four components in this less-than-two-minute video.

To determine the right specifications for your centrifugal fan application, reach out and connect with one of our application engineers to discuss the details of your project.

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