Bee Clean Specialties vs. In-House Maintenance.

What are the advantages of hiring out your electrostatic air cleaner maintenance? Would it make sense to switch to using an external service company to maintain the air cleaners in your facility? It depends.

There are advantages and disadvantages to maintaining your own air cleaners. Here is an analysis of reasons you might want to do it in-house vs. hiring it out.

In-house: 

• Cheaper
  • If your maintenance team has the experience needed and additional time to work on your electrostatic air cleaners, it can be cheaper to maintain them in-house.
• Adaptable to your schedule 
  • If you are maintaining your electrostatic air cleaners in-house, you can take advantage of shift changes or an unexpected machine downtime to service the air cleaners.
• Can respond to problems quickly.
  • If a problem arises with your air cleaner, such as a bad power supply, your internal maintenance team can respond very quickly to the problem, as long as you have the necessary parts in stock.
• Initial Investment
  • If you do not have a spare set of filters, you may need to purchase one in order to keep your air cleaners running while you clean and repair the dirty filters.

The Clean Air Switch: 

• Less machine downtime
  • Our service technicians work on electrostatics every day of the week, so they are able to service electrostatic air cleaners in a comparatively shorter amount of time while still thoroughly checking everything. Usually, they can service the air cleaner without needing to shut down the machine.
• Adaptable to your schedule
  • One of our values is flexibility. Working with you to find the best time or day of the week to service your air cleaners. Scheduling service ahead to give as much notice as you need. Also capable of emergency service should you need out-of-schedule maintenance or repair.
• No investment in exchange filters is necessary
  • We have a large stock of exchange filters that we bring on-site and swap with your dirty filters in order to keep you up and running as much as possible.
• Large inventory of parts in stock
  • Electrostatics have a lot of different parts to them and we stock pulleys, belts, insulators, power supplies, transformers, switches, and lights for all the major brands of electrostatics on our service trucks, as well as having a lot of parts, like motors, blowers, and contact boards, in stock at our service facility. If you maintain your own equipment, you will have to stock some of these items.
• Technicians with years of experience
  • Electrostatic air cleaners are intricate machines, and in order to properly maintain them, you need to understand how each component works. Electrostatic air cleaners also often use 3-phase power for the motor and high voltage DC for the filters. Collectors act as capacitors holding a charge after the power is off, so they can be dangerous to work with if you are not trained in how they work. 

We may be biased, but we think it is worth it to hire a service company to take care of your air filtration system in most scenarios. Here’s why:

• Your maintenance team is busy: Usually, your maintenance team has their hands full already ensuring that production equipment stays up and running.

• Your maintenance team isn’t trained in electrostatics: Electrostatic filtration systems are complicated and different from the machines most maintenance technicians are trained to work on. We had one maintenance manager tell us, “Your techs can fix a problem in a few minutes that would take me hours to track down, and I am a fully licensed electrician.”

• You don’t have the systems in place: Because we clean, inspect, and repair hundreds of electrostatic cells and ionizers every day, we have developed a system for exchanging and cleaning them that is thorough and efficient. Without a proper wash system, it takes a lot of time to clean the collections cells, and often they do not get properly cleaned.