How to Troubleshoot Common Pressure Regulator Issues

Customers today are operating with fewer and fewer resources. They look to their suppliers to help fill some of that gap. Our experts with regulators can not only help them select the right regulator, but they can also help them design an effective gas distribution system.

Swagelok has a global field engineering presence with all of our sales and service centers that can get in front of customers. We’re able to, at that point, share different applications, common applications, and common troubleshooting among our team.

I expect the field engineers to be working with customers to help them understand the requirements of the systems they’re designing: the pressures, the flows that are required, the media, and the temperature that the products will be working in. So, the field engineers really should be our front line of technical communication with potential customers.

Our field engineers can help customers find the right configuration, sized properly for their application, such that they’ll have the best performance suited to their application. Now, once that regulator is being used, our field engineers can also help diagnose any sort of performance-related concerns, whether that means how to set up the regulator properly or troubleshooting issues that might be seen under use. Things like supply pressure effect, or if there’s potentially a creeping regulator, they can help identify that and connect customers with the right maintenance kit to rectify the issue.

From a training standpoint, every field engineer has a standard onboarding curriculum that includes regulator product knowledge and application knowledge. But the best training that we get is being on-site with customers and actually seeing a regulator working in the wild, in real life, instead of understanding how it works on paper. That’s the best knowledge we can get: seeing it actually work.

In addition to the training through onboarding and continuing training available to all field engineers, we do have a group of more than a dozen subject matter experts in regulators particularly. These field engineers are closely tied to our product engineering team and technical experts, and they have deep expertise in the design, performance, operation, and troubleshooting of pressure regulators. They’re spread throughout the globe, so anywhere that a customer may have an issue or a need for pressure regulator expertise, we do have a subject matter expert close by.

Basically, what we take away from the customer is worries. I think the best example I did get from a customer was, “I want your product because if I install your product, I’m 100% sure that I’ve got more time with my family, that I have more time for my hobbies, and that I don’t need to come back to the plant every time because the regulation is failing. You helped me select the regulator that keeps working.”