The cost of frequent hydraulic equipment repairs can spiral out of control if deliberate measures aren't taken to limit equipment downtime. Below are measures that you can take to ensure that your hydraulic equipment will not require frequent repairs.
Set Correct Hydraulic Pressures
One of the reasons why hydraulic equipment fails frequently is setting the pressure of the system very high in a bid to get better productivity from that equipment. However, such a high-pressure setting can exert excessive stress upon the components of the system until they eventually fail. You will then spend lots of money replacing various components, such as hydraulic pumps and seals. These costs can be avoided if the pressure setting is checked after every hydraulic repair or maintenance session to confirm that it is within the range recommended by the equipment manufacturer.
Institute Better Troubleshooting Techniques
What methods are used by your technicians to identify and fix a fault once the hydraulic equipment breaks down? Some technicians may have a go-to part that they always suspect of causing a failure each time a defect is noticed. The technicians may then recommend the replacement of that part even if other causes of the defect haven't been investigated and ruled out. Such repairs resulting from gut feelings or guesses can turn out to be very costly even when they restore the equipment to normalcy for a while. It is much better to make sure that hydraulic schematics are available in the repair shop so that detailed troubleshooting can be done before any repair is attempted. The extra minutes spent troubleshooting will produce better dividends than rushing to return the equipment into service after performing incomplete troubleshooting.
Stop Rewarding Failure
Put your resources into preventing equipment downtime instead of rewarding failure. How do some people reward failure? Giving maintenance personnel incentives or bonuses for returning equipment quickly into service after a failure is an example of rewarding failure. Those people aren't motivated to keep the equipment working. Change your approach and start giving rewards for early detection of defects that could have caused the hydraulic equipment to fail. In this way, costly repairs will be minimised because the effort will be concentrated on proactive maintenance instead of reactive maintenance.
Ask a professional to assess your maintenance procedure so that any gaps can be identified and corrected. Only then will hydraulic equipment repairs become rare despite the heavy use of your equipment.
