5 THINGS EVERY FACILITY SHOULD PREPARE FOR WINTER TO AVOID PIPELINE BURSTS

Winter may be a few months away, but there are things that your facility should be doing to prepare for winter. With over 15 years of experience working with Heat Trace systems, EHT Group can help you properly prepare and maintain your heat trace infrastructure ahead of the winter months.  

We see it time and time again, facilities spending incredible amounts of money to maintain their heat trace infrastructure and yet, each winter they experience pipeline bursts, or they are finding themselves spending more time, and resources preparing their facility for the colder months.  

With these five steps, you can eliminate the risk of pipe bursts, repairs and massive repair and maintenance costs.  

1. Conduct a Simple Programming Audit 1-2 Times a Year  

By conducting a simple audit of your heat trace controller programming, you can catch potential critical failures early. Through these audits you can catch heat trace circuits that won’t operate correctly, faulty controller alarms, and blind operations. 

The solution: Connect your controllers to a laptop using a monitoring software (SmartTrace Monitoring as an option). If you have a fully networked system this will be much easier. One of the key benefits of using monitoring software is that you can download settings onto an excel sheet making quick work of checking a wide range of settings.  

What to look for:  

• Maintain temperature 
• Low temperature 
• Low current alarm 
• High current alarm 
• Ground fault settings 
• RTD failure alarms 
• Circuit enabled 
• High temperature alarms 
• Auto cycle 

We built SmartTrace monitoring with the ability to conduct live programming reviews. Learn more about SmartTrace Monitoring here.

2.Investigate Your Forced On Heat Trace Circuits  

Circuits that are forced-on during the winter months oftentimes just stay energized all year long, unless managed. There are enormous power savings available here. We can increase the life span of your heat trace cables by not keeping them forced-on during the warmer weather. Ensuring these aren’t kept on during the summer is important but so is investigating why they were forced-on in the first place. 

To check your forced on circuits do the following:  

1. Look at your forced-on circuit list and determine what can be de-energized until winter. 
2. Conduct a programming audit to catch forced-on circuits in step 1. 
3. Schedule field assessments to investigate the possible root cause of the forced-on circuit. Installation on failures, design failures, insulation deficiencies are all reasons why circuits get forced-on in the first place.  

 

3.Monitoring Your Heat Tracing During Warmer Weather

Make sure you are monitoring the alarms at least once a week during the warm weather and scheduling field assessments and repairs when things are not mission critical. Often-times maintenance teams will pick heat trace monitoring programs back up in the fall, only to flood the maintenance schedules with field assessments and repair activities.  

4. Conduct Panel Audits

A panel audit is a simple preventive maintenance activity that we would recommend for every facility. The audit of a panel is ideally going to:  

1. Retorque all termination 
2. Provide a visual inspection on looking for overheating on terminal blocks, lugs, EMR’s or solid state relays. If you have an infrared camera available, this is even better
3. Investigate any circuits that may be locked out and forgotten. 
4. Panel clean up. 

 

5. Insulation Inspections

Heat tracing is essentially useless without proper insulation. We have encountered a handful of pipe freezes and bursts where the heat trace was energized but the insulation on was missing, temporary insulation on was installed, insulation on was wet or the wrong insulation on was used. Remember – there are major differences in heat loss between different insulation types and thicknesses. We recommend having a preventative maintenance program to visually inspect all areas of your facility to capture lines with no insulation or lines where last year’s temporary insulation is still installed.  

Do not let heat tracing cause unnecessary maintenance costs and operational upsets to your facility. Heat tracing does not have to be a massive burden or a ticking time bomb. At EHT Group, our mission is to help facilities by ensuring heat tracing failures aren’t getting in the way with you operating your facility efficiently.  

Implement these 5 easy steps and get the peace of mind that you are prepared for the cold weather. We are always here to help, so please contact one of our heat trace experts if you need any assistance.