Decatur Industrial was asked to perofrm a motor inspection and motor cleaning during an already scheduled outage for a customer. During the inspection, one of our technicians found an end cover to be rotting away due to leakage.

After removing the end cover it was determined that it was in too bad of shape to re-install when cleaning was completed.

Since the motor was going to be down for few more days, it was covered to keep any foreign materials from entering the motor. The end cover was brought back to our shop where D.I.E had an end cover made to replace it. One finished, it was installed on the same motor.

This total project cost less than $3,000 to the customer. A repair likely would have been close to $100,000 and a new motor would have cost close to $200,000.

Finished project! 

When a motor is pulled from storage and installed, it is frustrating to the customer when there is an immediate problem. In this case, the customer had a leaking vertical motor starting from the install date. It had been rebuilt by another motor repair shop prior and the customer did not understand what was causing the problem.

D.I.E was engaged and performed a disassembly and evaluation to try and find the root cause. We found the oil sight glass used on the upper bearing was not marked correctly. In addition, the motor had a lubrication specification ID tag that was not correct to the motor or reservoir sizes, lending itself to operator error.

After researching the OEM motor specifications, we added the correct oil capacity information next to a new, correctly sized, sight glass. We also removed the lubrication ID tag that was no longer correct. The savings from avoiding this occurrence again is close to $15,000 per incident.  

Interested in more information on this subject?

 Read our previously published TECH TIP: Oil Level of Vertical Machines.

Let us Help You get the Right Motor for the Right Application

A Decatur Industrial customer needed a suitable 800 HP motor replacement to go inside a large coal fired power plant. The current motor had quite a bit of age and special features, which made it an involved process when looking to buy a new replacement.

This motor is used in a coal conveyor system, transporting coal from the barge on the river to the plant for electrical energy production. In addition to being out in the weather, this motor requires coal dust protection for fire and explosion safety reasons.

We engaged with our partnered motor manufacturer to address the dust and safety concerns, ensuring the customer is abiding with all operational safety codes. Furthermore, we were able to consider size differences and crane/hoist considerations with the customer.

By ensuring that our product offering is correct for the customer environment and application we were able to help them avoid purchasing an incorrectly specified custom above NEMA motor. The savings based on the motor cost alone is over $100,000.

Discover the difference with you buy from us direct.

• Application assistance
• Distributor pricing advantage
• We service what we sell
• Installation & commissioning support
• Storage and maintenance program
• Reliability & condition monitoring services
• 24 / 7 delivery
• HUGE inventory on-site

The Decatur Industrial Electric field service crew received a video from a customer along with a request to come on-site and balance a fan immediately on an emergency basis.

The simple video and conversation between our technician and the customer highlighted some issues that needed to be addressed before the time and expense of dynamic balancing was needed.

The customer was able to fix the problem and schedule a fan precision balance during a scheduled outage, without emergency costs associated.

See what happened by watching this short video.