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The High Cost Of Low Cost Knock-Off Valves
Last week we spoke about the Abrasive Metering Valve and I challenged you to make an estimate about how much money in abrasive you thought would go thru a pot in its lifetime.
(If you missed that video – you can watch it here.)
When we break it down it may shock you how much money flows through your valve!
Let’s start with giving you an understanding of how much money you will actually spend on abrasive over the course of a year. This is important because a metering valve is designed to meter and conserve abrasive – not just let it pour out.
A typical blaster will on average blast for about 5 hours per day, 4 days per week. That equates to 1,000 hours per year of blasting. That’s over 10,000 hours of metering in the 10 year life span of a blast pot.
At these blasting rates, depending on what abrasive you use, you will meter between $100,000 – $250,000 of abrasive each year. In Ten years, this is $1-2.5 million. How much of that abrasive is wasted by excessive flow?
This is why the effectiveness of your metering valve is so important. This is why we recommend Schmidt valves. Not using Schmidt because you save $200 is a costly mistake.
Let’s flesh that out a bit more to help you understand the costs.
There are 3 areas that translate into profit or losses, depending on your valve.
- Abrasive Savings
- Repair Parts Savings
- Downtime Costs
Abrasive Savings
Because of Schmidt’s insistence on quality and manufacturing tolerances, you get consistent abrasive metering which our experiences shows saves a minimum of 100lbs of abrasive per hour – generally more! 100lbs of wasted abrasive per blasting hour equates to about $15,000 of wasted abrasive per year, every year.
Can you now see why spending an extra $200 up front on a Thompson valve will actually save you money?
Repair Parts Savings
We have been selling repair parts for 35 years and when we started selling Schmidt products back in 1996 our repair parts business drastically reduced. Schmidt valves just last longer.
- If you have an Inlet/Outlet style blast pot, you will spend roughly $2000 per year on repair parts
- If it’s a knock off Thompson, its $1500 per year
- If it’s a Genuine Schmidt Thompson Valve its $800 per year
- If it’s a Schmidt TeraValve its only $500 per year…
The difference between the valves and how long they work is drastic. Your ROI buying a TeraValve is less than 3 months in repair parts alone!
Downtime
Now let’s talk about downtime. We’ve installed TeraValves on most of our rental fleet and our in-house techs have proven that they will last 2-3 times longer than a Schmidt Thompson and up to 5x longer than any other valve before needing rebuilt.
But here are the downtime specifics…
- Inlet / outlet pots need rebuilt every month
- Knock off Valves – every 2 months
- Genuine Schmidt Thompson Valves every 6-8 months
- And the new TeraValves – about once per year
What is your downtime worth? In some cases you could lose 1 productive day every month just because someone wanted to save $500 on buying non-genuine valves.
To summarize, it is obvious for all the reasons we’ve outlined above, that buying genuine Schmidt pots, valves, and replacement parts, are the best decision for your company’s long-term productivity and profitability.
