Remember the time you had to buy a CD to get your hands on your favorite music? Or when you opted for a late-night movie at home, but had to run to a video rental store to get one before it closes? Now that subscription-based services like Netflix® or Spotify® are a part of our daily lives, we could hardly imagine going back to the time without them.
In the industrial world, when talking about utilities like water, electricity and heat, we are used to the idea of subscription-based services. Compressed air is often referred to as the “fourth utility” because it is critical to a number of functions within manufacturing facilities and used almost everywhere. However, unlike the other utilities, the user of a compressed air system bears the responsibility of building, maintaining, repairing and monitoring it, and the concept of considering compressed air as a service is new to many. As we all know, compressed air systems consume a substantial part of plant’s electricity. In addition, as compressed air needs may vary and change substantially, building and maintaining a system that suits all the changing needs without compromising availability, or wasting energy by oversizing the system can be challenging.
What if you didn’t have to worry about maintaining your compressed air system yourself? With the Tamturbo Touch-Free™ Air service model, you only pay for the compressed air you use and we take care of the rest. Additionally, Touch-Free™ Air allows you to adjust your compressed air system to your needs without capital investment. This helps companies manage their balance sheets, keeping them lighter.
Care-Free operations with Touch-Free™ Air
Touch-Free™ Air is very easy for customers. Tamturbo, together with our local distributor performs an analysis of your compressed air needs (consumption, usage pattern and pressure variations). We recommend a compressed air system and installation and operate it for you. The system can be easily scaled up or down to meet your changing air needs in future. You will not need CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) to source the equipment and service. This means the monthly cost is a variable cost rather than a capital cost. You benefit from 100% expense write-off vs. substantially lesser benefit from traditional amortization schedule. Touch-Free™ Air offers genuine predictability and cost transparency in your compressed air production. Your monthly payment ($/month) is fixed and will not go up as long as the unit is under the Touch-Free™ Air plan. You can buy the unit at the end of each year at predetermined and reduced cost with credits from payments applied.
Flexibility to meet your varying needs
Touch-Free™ Air adjusts to the varying compressed air needs of your business two-fold:
Firstly, the air compressor setup can be scaled if your needs change. There’s no need to invest in new compressed air equipment because you can change to a larger or smaller size unit with reset Touch-Free™ payment.
Secondly, Tamturbo® VSD adjusts to the changing needs of compressed air without any energy-wasting blowout with a turndown range of as high as 63%. Additionally, the turbo compressors enable easy energy rebates, as over 90% of the air compressor input power can be captured to warm water for your process, heating or other needs.
Peace of mind with Care-Free reliability
With Touch-Free™ Air, you have exactly the right amount of 100% oil free compressed air 24/7. You can rest assured that you will have sufficient air supply at all times, and you don’t pay for downtime, should it result from equipment.
You don’t have to worry about maintenance, service or available upgrades (software or hardware) because we take care of everything related to your air production. In addition, thanks to our reliable Touch-Free™ core technology, there hardly are any maintenance needs to begin with. Tamturbo air compressor technology is based on active magnetic bearings with no contact between the rotating components. Parts that don’t touch, don’t wear and there’s not a single drop of oil in the compressor. To ensure premium quality, we use only the best components and our 24-hour remote monitoring and predictive maintenance, optimization and on-point technical support guarantee that you can concentrate on your core doing.
Touch-Free Monitoring in real world – snapshot of case experiences
In the traditional air compressor technology, an error, fault signal or unit shut down prompts the customer to contact the compressor distributor: “My air compressor is down / shows a fault / has alarm. How fast can you get someone here?” From this point, it may take several hours or even days before the issue is attended.
In Touch-Free Monitoring we see any issues in real time and most of the time have solved it before the user even knows about it. Real world cases, backed with data, have consistently shown how many compressors issues are caused by external factors. These include changes in power feed, cooling system or ambient conditions. The Touch-Free Technology itself has proven to be just as Care-Free “as advertised”.
Fast reactions prevent loss of compressed air and thus, problems to your process or operations. And this, is where the real savings to you come from!
To give an insight into what this actually means, here are some Real-World Samples of how the Touch-Free Monitoring saved the day:
1. A customer with a TT185 turbo compressor had an issue with their closed loop water pump. This dropped the cooling circuit pressure below set low pressure, prompting an alert. Upon receiving a message from the compressor, the Monitoring team aligned the parameters for the cooling water pressure and the turbo compressor continued to run without disruptions, optimizing uptime.
2. The space where the TT185 turbo compressor operates sees temporary high temperature peaks. This caused alerts for higher than set temperature site range. The Monitoring team adjusted the delay for high ambient temperature alerts. This eliminated alerts from temporary and short ambient temperature peaks.
3. The Touch-Free Monitoring engineer on duty received an early morning message from the compressor. The compressor had stopped. After reviewing the log data, he concluded the power supply had lost a leg (one of the three phases). He called the customer plant operations to ask possible reasons for the fault. As it turned out, the entire plant was down for external power supply failure and that the plant operations did not know the reason until they learned it from the Tamturbo team.
What would have happened if these were old type air compressors? An alarm on the air compressor control panel would prompt a service call request and possibly a shutdown of the compressor. This, in turn, could have resulted to further disruptions and downtime.
With Touch-Free Monitoring, virtually all cases are resolved almost immediately, without sending anyone to physically work on the air compressor and without disruptions to the customer operations, hence ensuring more uptime.
Read more on remote monitoring and the possibilities it offers in terms of optimizing compressed air systems, improving maintenance and minimizing downtime: CABP article on remote monitoring
Learn more about Touch-Free™ Air and how your business can benefit from it.
You can reach us directly and we can design the perfect compressed air solution for your purposes. Our global network of compressed air professionals is at your service!
