TLDR: Meadow Lake OSB installed SonicAire fans in their 80-foot tall bulk storage building to maintain compliance while avoiding costly production shutdowns. The automated system prevents the $4,000/hour downtime costs associated with manual cleaning and eliminates dangerous elevated cleaning operations.
Key Points:
• 80-foot ceiling height made manual cleaning extremely dangerous
• Mill downtime costs $4,000 per hour
• Investment met corporate financial constraints through ROI analysis
• Maintains continuous compliance during operations
• Plant manager reports “much better feeling” about safety
Transcript:
The fans have been doing a good job of keeping the areas of the mill clean that we put them in to keep clean.
At Meadow Lake, we have a large bulk storage building that we use to store dry strands in. Conveying the strand into that room, there’s a lot of dust that’s produced and cleaning that dust was getting in our way of effectively using that building.
We couldn’t maintain the dust levels that were required to and still operate the equipment in there regularly without some on going level of dust prevention in there. That’s what made us look at the SonicAire fans.
Under the old way of managing it we would go from having a clean compliant bulk storage area to an area that was out of compliance that we would shut down and clean. The cost of running the mill is about $4000/hour and no strands means you’re not making any money.
When we were looking at the installation of the SonicAire fans, like most companies, we have to justify the expense. We looked at the cost of the installation versus what we believe we would save in cleaning that room in the future and what we would save by any downtime that we might face because we had to have a room down to clean it and we were pretty sure that putting those fans in would meet any financial or investment constraints the corporation imposes on us.
The fans keep the dust blown off the most expensive parts of the building to clean. The ceiling in the bulk storage room is over 80ft tall and we would have to put people in man-lifts to physically remove that material from the rafters and even the atmosphere created by that cleaning activity was a concern so not having to go through that process is nice to not have to do anymore.
So my honest opinion of the SonicAire fans is that it has a lot of potential for us. It’s going to allow us to maintain operation of that key part of our mill in a safe manner going forward. We’re able to maintain that room in a state of compliance as we use it all the time and as a plant manager that’s a much better feeling.
