For those of you who work in factory/production welding I was just curious if there was any personal preference or anecodtal stories about using manifold delivered gas via 6-packs or dewars vs having every machine with a K-bottle.
We use about 110 bottles of Argon a year on our GTAW machines so I did the math on switching to Dewars, $3000 less in gas costs! Then I factored in the natural evaporation rate and that number goes down to $1000 in savings, it's still money in the bank but makes me wonder if it's worth the hassle to plumb a 100' manifold and this and that to save $1000 a year.
My personal thought is that it's always worth it to go to a manifold delivery system as then all your bottles are at one point (usually outside) for safety, and welders can focus on welding, not switching out bottles. The other risk factor is when some yahoo causes a leak you are blowing through hundreds of dollars worth of gas overnight instead of 1 K bottle. Finally from my own research dewars are much much much less likely to ever be contaminated vs 6-packs or bottles, not an issue usually for manual welding but was big in aerospace and nuclear work where a contaminated weld could costs tens of thousands in repairs.
Any thoughts? or am I just way to preoccupied with gas delivery systems.
Money in the bank is money in the bank. you have to look at your ROI for how much $$$ setting up the manifold system will cost. also if the dewars don't pencil out then you could always run the 6 pack on the system.
You somewhat mention it yourself, don't forget to add all the savings from welders not needing to stop production to switch out a tank. In a year that can really add up. Especially if there is a leak in their system and then they leave a tank on overnight compounding the number of times they switch out tanks.
I didn't realize there was that much loss to bring the savings down 66%. Seems kinda high.
But, that $1000 is better in your pocket than in the suppliers'. Cost of install will be saved back fairly soon it appears.
He Is In Control, Have a Great Day, Brent
If you run your 100' header in an economical material/method of construction, and use an automatic switchover outside, you should be able to save a good bit in just cylinder changing cost. your volume looks to be a little light for dewar supply, 6-packs should be just fine
Yah our usage is probably a little low for dewars they would be sitting outside in southern california evaporation loss is about 4% a day we would only turn about 6-10 dewars a year or every 50ish days , 4% loss over 50 days is quite a bit.
Hello Metarinka, we have used single bottles for a long time at our facility. We considered Dwars and then determined that we didn't use enough gas to justify their use. That being said we opted to go with six-packs due to the changeover time and thinking that it would simplify the whole process. We found out one other small detail however that brought us back to single cylinders: the rental fee for a six-pack was right at $100/month the single bottle rental was roughly $5/month, when our use was factored into this scenario the singles were still much more economically feasible. In essence I believe that you have to consider all of the details of your use and go with what pencils out. Good luck and best regards, Allan
Good point, I didn't even think of that for rental feels. I'm not even adverse to just buying single bottles and making my own Manifold to run them all as I've seen that before as well.
In the end the higher-ups shot it down as it seemed like more work than it was worth.
Use a manifold system to run both mig gas ( 85/15) and tig gas ( 100% argon) .......cut out bottle change times on 3 to 5 feeders running at a time , and 1 to 3 torches at a time...... Plus the safety issue of moving bottles all thru the shop.... Run 2 of the biggest bottles I can get in the manifold (k ?) , when they run out replace w/ another set and put in an order for delivery of another set........Savings seems to run around 50% plus safety " piece of mind"........ Used 3/4" scd. 80 plastic pipe for most of delivery system.....Also a nice feature is "setting" a flow of 25-35 and not having to worry about some jackass wanting to run at a "wastefully" higher setting!!!!!!!
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