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Found out my dredge pump was working twice as hard as it needed to, surprise waste
I was going through the old logbooks from the past two seasons on the Mississippi near Baton Rouge, just to compare cycle times for a bid I'm putting together. Out of boredom I started adding up the total hours we ran at full throttle versus the actual yardage we moved. Turns out we were over-speeding the pump for about 40% of the runtime, basically just churning water and wearing out the impeller faster. The maintenance manual had a chart I never really looked at, showing the sweet spot RPM for our specific slurry density. Once I matched that, we cut fuel use by maybe 15 bucks an hour, which adds up over a 10 hour shift. I felt like an idiot for not checking this sooner, but also kind of proud that I caught it. Has anyone else found a hidden efficiency win in their old logs or manual pages?
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elizabeth_king27d ago
Did you ever dig into a manual and find something so obvious you almost threw the book across the room? A buddy of mine ran a small excavating outfit and was burning through hydraulic filters way too fast, then one day he actually read the section on return line pressure and found out he had a kink in a hose nobody had ever checked. Fixed it in ten minutes and his filter costs dropped by half. That chart you skipped is probably printed right next to a dozen other ones nobody ever flips to.
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