Whether you developed your gas detection program or inherited it from a predecessor, you’re responsible for keeping your gas monitor fleet in the field and protecting your workers. When someone on your team picks up a gas monitor at the beginning of their shift, they are betting their life on its ability to alert them to hazards.
To make sure that your people can depend on their gas detectors, it’s crucial that you perform bump tests, maintenance, and repairs on a regular basis. These gas monitor maintenance procedures, although common, can pose major challenges when you consider that each time a unit is out of calibration or needs repair, you risk downtime, extra work, and additional costs.
Below are some of the most common challenges we see when it comes to maintaining a gas monitor fleet. The good news? All of them can be solved with one simple box.
Turnaround Time on Maintenance and Repairs
When you have a gas detector that needs to be repaired, how long does it take? What does your process look like?
If you handle repairs on-site, it can be hard to make sure you have the right staff available at the right place and the right time to expedite repairs and maintenance needs. Often, staff are responsible for other equipment as well, and the workload can be high. When you have fewer workers available, will critical gas detector maintenance still get done?
Downtime for repairs can slow your operations for weeks and put your workers at unnecessary risk. Alternatively, you might keep extra monitors on hand for times like this, but that drives your costs higher than needed. You end up spending extra cash on “what if” monitors that collect dust in a corner.
Cost of Gas Monitor Maintenance and Repairs
Do you know how much you spend on gas detector maintenance? If you don’t, you’re not alone. When our people are in the field, we find that many safety managers don’t know how much they spend on gas detector maintenance and repair. Each repair is handled as-needed and the total annual repair cost can’t be accessed quickly.
Beyond repairs, the cost of managing your gas detection program is more than just the direct costs like monitors, sensors, and calibration gas—it also includes indirect costs like downtime, third-party repairs, and administrative hassles. These may not seem like much, but they add up quickly as your program grows and as monitors age. Because of this, gas monitor maintenance costs are hard to define and many companies have little understanding of just how much they’re spending.
Here are some categories to consider when trying to estimate the costs of your gas detection program:
- Parts and materials: gas monitors and spares, sensors, batteries, filters, calibration gas
- Your team’s labor to test and repair gas monitors
- Downtime and lost productivity when the right safety equipment isn’t available for your people to do their jobs
Additionally, we know that the paperwork and approval for these expenses or purchase orders also costs your company valuable time. It’s estimated that an industrial purchase order costs a company as much as $400 to process each order.
With all these expenses in mind, you might have a better idea just how much you really spend on maintaining your gas monitor fleet. For a more complete breakdown of your program costs and how you can decrease them, check out our iNet® Exchange Cost Calculator. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to see how much you might be overspending on your program.
Expertise
Gas detectors are highly technical pieces of technology and can be complicated to diagnose and fix without extensive experience. Most of us wouldn’t attempt to disassemble and repair our work computers to fix an issue because we don’t have the expertise, and our action could harm our productivity for days or even weeks until an expert can resolve the problem for us.
Turning to a trusted expert for gas detector repair and maintenance allows your teams to focus on what they know best.
The Cost of Doing Nothing
It’s easy to fall into the status quo of your gas detection program, but what happens when the status quo isn’t giving your workers the awareness they need when it comes to hazardous gases? When your name is on the calibration certificate, are you confident that every monitor is accurate and performing at its best?
The cost of your gas detection program represents something priceless: protecting the lives of your people and ensuring they go home safely each day.
The Easy Way to Solve Maintenance Pains
Gas detection maintenance pains aren’t something you have to suffer in silence. With a subscription maintenance service like iNet® Exchange, every time you dock your monitors, Industrial Scientific looks at the life of the sensors, the state of the monitor, the circuit board, the microprocessors, the pump and tells you, before it fails, whether a monitor will need to be replaced soon. You get an e-mail alert that your replacement detector is on the way.
Before you know it, an iNet Exchange box is on your doorstep with a new unit to replace that questionable detector. That one box has the new unit you need to get back up and running, plus a label to ship your damaged unit back to Industrial Scientific. No work orders, no purchase order request, and virtually no time for you or your team. By eliminating purchase orders, iNet Exchange dramatically reduces the time and costs associated with your gas detection program. Not only that, but you can count on one, fixed monthly cost to cover everything you need to run a top-notch gas detection program—no more unexpected charges to keep the gas monitors your team needs in great shape.
This is gas detection as a service, where everything is included. It means you can spend less time on gas detector repair and replacement, and more time managing your safety program. iNet Exchange gets you back up and running much faster than traditional repair processes. This streamlines the number of backup units you buy and reduces the risk of downtime in your operation. With iNet exchange you could have zero downtime per repair or as little as 1-3 days from unit failure. When outages are predicted through the DSX™ Docking Station, your new unit can arrive before your current detector is out of range.
Small Fleets and Large Fleets Benefit from Simple Maintenance
You can have a more efficient gas detector program whether you have a fleet of four detectors or two hundred detectors. When uptime and safety are a priority and it’s critical that your gas maintenance program runs efficiently, we can customize a gas detector lease program that meets your needs. Regardless of the size of your fleet, iNet Exchange is the simple and pain free way to manage your gas detection program.
For more information on how iNet® Exchange can make gas detection easy, contact us or download our eBook, Take the Pain out of Gas Detector Maintenance or use our cost calculator to see how your current program stacks up.
