Hose Advisory and Optimization Services

Our customers these days are undergoing a lot of pressures. They have to cut down costs, and there’s a lot of pressure to perform with limited resources, whether those are infrastructure resources or financial resources. There’s also a lot of pressure to keep systems working longer without any breakdowns.

When a hose fails, and they didn’t plan on that hose failing, it can bring down their entire system or, in some cases, their entire production line. And you can attach a dollar amount directly to that.

By operating under those extreme pressures and temperatures, if the hose were to fail, it could cause damage to the personnel working in the facility. So, it’s imperative that we maintain the pressure inside the hose and protect the operators around the machinery to make sure they are well protected from the hose or any system fluids that are inside the hose.

It’s a service where Swagelok comes to the customer site with a team of trained hose specialists. First, we work with the customer to see what their goals are. Maybe it’s an application where they have experienced increased maintenance, and they’d like to have a hose specialist take a look and help them figure out how they can increase the service life of their hose.

Customers face frequent failures in hoses, and not all of them find the right underlying cause of that failure. There’s something wrong that is adding to the cost of maintenance, so we come up with issues as simple as kinking, wrong hose selection, or compatibility issues. Even something as simple as the length of the hose matters.

Metal hose may not be installed in the right plane, or the end connection of the hose may actually be bent on the radius.

In some cases, we don’t know what we’re looking for. We just know their hoses aren’t lasting. So, in those cases, we really need to put on the detective hat and look at things outside of just what the hose looks like, ask a lot of good questions, and try to get to the root cause.

We provide a list of best practices and a list of improvements they can make, opportunities for improvement. If you can identify which hoses are at risk for premature failure, then you can get those hoses on a preventive maintenance cycle and take care of them before they become a problem.

So, if you have a hose that lasts longer, or products that have a better life cycle in the same applications, there’s less downtime, and you save money with that.

We work with customers who have been finding leaks in their hoses but couldn’t find the source. We came in and identified that they could potentially have electrostatic discharge happening. Then, we used a different hose, a hose that works better in cases where electrostatic discharge can happen, and those leaks disappeared.

There are a few reasons why our customers really enjoy working with our hose advisors. First, we don’t just sell one hose; we have a very broad product line and a very broad offering. Second, we have very well-trained hose advisors who understand which products go into which applications. There’s a lot of expertise within the one Swagelok global network.

And the third reason is that our customers are very confident that our hose advisors and that one Swagelok team are going to work very diligently and very hard to make sure we are picking the optimal hose for a given application. That’s going to drive things like uptime, system reliability, productivity, all these elements are really driving the life cycle value for our customers.