How Lube Room Design Impacts Your Asset Reliability Program
A well-planned lube room design is critical to the success of any asset reliability program, directly affecting equipment performance, maintenance efficiency, and worker safety. Organized storage helps prevent lubricant contamination, reduces downtime by streamlining maintenance tasks, and minimizes workplace hazards from spills. Secure access controls ensure that only trained personnel handle lubricants, protecting valuable resources. Partnering with experts like Walthall Oil can enhance your facility’s efficiency and reliability through strategic lube room design.
It’s strange to think that the layout of a single room in your facility can have dramatic impacts on your team’s ability to keep your machinery operating at its maximum efficiency. Why should it matter what lubricants go on what shelves? Everything has a label on it, doesn’t it?
No matter how detailed and effective your asset reliability program is, if your lube room design isn’t intentional and crafted to your facility’s specific needs, you’re not getting the most out of your team, your equipment, or your lubricants.
Your asset reliability partners at Walthall bring more than 100 years of experience in asset reliability management and consulting to help customers develop and maintain lube rooms that significantly improve their overall maintenance and reliability programs. In this article, we share a few ways that a well-thought-out and executed lube room design can lead to significant savings for your company.
Lube Room Design Impacts Lube Cleanliness
A disproportionately high number of equipment failures all start with one fault: contaminated lubricant. There are few situations in which minuscule amounts of contamination can cause severe damage to a company’s operation, but this is one of them. Lubricant contamination is a primary cause of failures in industrial settings:
- Particulate contaminants block internal lubrication channels and cause abrasion to bearing surfaces.
- Water reduces lubricant effectiveness, causes corrosion of critical components, and can rapidly mix throughout the entire lubrication system, causing widespread component damage.
- Cross-contamination between lubricants or between lubricants and other chemicals can significantly alter the physical properties of both products, making them unfit for the job they’re being asked to do.
In a well-designed lube room, there are several safeguards to prevent these and other kinds of contamination:
- Dedicated lube storage can be kept closed away from the rest of the facility, reducing the risk of environmental contaminants ruining your lubricants.
- Color-coded storage containers, oil cans, grease guns, and other tools make it easy to find the right equipment for applying a given lubricant.
- Purpose-built storage solutions make it easier for your team to ensure that all lubricants are stored in the proper containers to keep out dust, humidity, and other potential contaminants.
Lube Room Design Impacts Maintenance Efficiency
If you’ve ever had the displeasure of working in an unorganized space, you know how time-consuming it can be to find the tool or piece of information you need to complete a task. Now, picture your maintenance team when it’s time for equipment lubrication. They have to find the proper lubricant, find the right tool for applying it, do the lubrication job, and then start over again with a new piece of equipment.
When everything is organized and consistent, with the most commonly used items in the most accessible locations, maintenance tasks can become dramatically more efficient. When everything can be easily and unmistakably identified at a glance, it cuts down on time spent running back and forth between worksites because a team member realized they grabbed the wrong oil can or grease gun.
Lube Room Design Impacts Worker Safety
Lubricants have one thing in common, the one thing that makes them valuable: they’re slick. After all, when two pieces of metal rub against one another day in and day out several thousand times a minute, you need a thin layer of something slick in between them, or they will get very hot and very damaged very quickly.
However, the slickness that makes them crucial on the facility floor makes them dangerous when they’re on the floor of the facility. If your team has been leaving oil cans at workstations or sitting on the floor, odds are pretty good that you’ve had at least one lubricant spill in the last year. Even if it was cleaned up quickly and nobody went skating in their workboots, that was still valuable lubricant lost forever.
With all of your lube supplies and tools collected into one secure room with a nonskid floor, the likelihood of a lubricant spill and subsequent work-related injuries goes way down.
Lube Room Design Impacts Resource Security
Through your asset reliability program, you and your consultants train specific workers to understand the techniques and importance of lubrication and maintenance. But what about the rest of the team? If you have trained and untrained team members working together on your production floor, you need to be aware of the dangers of untrained members using lubricants incorrectly in your equipment.
When your lube room design integrates security measures, such as key or electronic access control, you can rest assured that the only people accessing your valuable lubricants are the ones trained to use them correctly.
Walthall Oil: Your Lube Room Design Experts
Walthall Oil Company is proud to provide asset reliability services under our WARS banner. Customers in Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee enjoy the convenience and savings of having a single partner to provide them with turnkey asset reliability consulting, including lube room design and lubrication training. Give us a call today at 478-781-1234 to find out how Walthall can work for you!
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