Lubricant procurement is not the largest expenditure in a typical maintenance budget. However, it is viewed as a real, tangible expense that is frequently targeted for cost reduction. When it comes to lubricants, it is unwise to pretend to save money by “buying cheap.”
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Lubricants are the lifeblood of your machinery. Your machines’ life expectancy depends largely on the quality and state of these lubricants to bathe heavily loaded frictional surfaces. This also goes for investing in quality technologies and tools used in your lubrication program (such as routing software or automated lubricators) to promote efficiency. Optimum reliability and lubrication must go hand in hand.
Now that you are aware of the perils of poor-quality lubricants and lubrication, let’s take a look at the many opportunities to reduce lubricant spending without compromising reliability. Start by writing a simple lubricant specification for each machine.
Don’t rely solely on the recommendations of the equipment supplier or service manual. Instead, be bold and challenge generic or generalized statements relating to viscosity and lubricant formulation.
Once again, there is a need for caution. I’m not suggesting willy-nilly lubricant changes in an effort to enhance reliability by trial and error. There is always risk associated with changing lubricants. Smart practices, though, can quickly overcome these dangers. Risk should be respected but not feared.
The lubricant specification should be aligned with the optimum reference state for machine reliability. In constructing this specification, you should understand machine failure modes and overall machine criticality as a foundation to defining a machine’s precise lubricant needs.
There is a vast number of lubricant types available from both major and independent suppliers. Navigating the maze of options can be daunting but often very worth the effort. Find help if needed.
Reducing lubricant spending requires change and initiative. For many organizations, the low-hanging fruit is obvious. Below are five effective strategies for reducing your annual lubricant spending.
1. Precision Optimum-life Lubricant Selection
Optimum means optimum. Don’t overspend and most definitely don’t underspend – it’s important to resist the lure of cheap oil. Attempting to save money by buying economy-formulated lubricants for the wrong application is hazardous.
Likewise, don’t be trapped by the false promise of forgiveness. It is equally hazardous to attempt to remedy bad lubrication practices by buying expensive premium lubricants.
Beware of small differences. Selecting an optimum lubricant for a machine application is an engineering process. Small differences in lubricant performance can translate into huge differences in machine reliability and lubricant cost. Don’t choose just any lubricant – seek the optimum.
Be conservative with the number of lubricants in your plant, though. Reduce the number of lubricants in your storeroom to a comfortable and efficient few. The number and range of lubricants you need will depend heavily on the types of machines and their operating environment.
Long-life lubricants in the right application make a lot of sense. They extend drain intervals and lower the cost and risk of premature lubricant failure. Selecting a long-life lubricant can reduce oil consumption in many cases by more than 50 percent.
Still, it is important to be prudent. Don’t invest in long-life lubricants for an application where they have to be changed frequently for other reasons (e.g., contamination) or where excessive leakage can’t be controlled.
2. Proactive Lubricant Life Extension
In normal service, lubricants age over time in a linear fashion. Eventually, they die due to additive depletion or other causes. However, life expectancy is not only related to the quality of the lubricant but also to the type and extent of in-service exposures.
The most destructive exposures are contaminants such as heat, air, moisture, and water. This has been discussed extensively in the pages of Machinery Lubrication. Most users dismiss the opportunity to make practical exposure changes and enhance machine reliability and lubricant life.
This is a pity because contamination control often constitutes the easiest and most certain savings opportunities. Go with what works.
Exposures also relate to topping up a machine that contains remnants of an aged lubricant with a new lubricant. When new lubricants are mixed with oxidized, degraded oils, they quickly degrade. You could say old, damaged lubricants are infested with diseases that can rapidly infect the new incoming lubricants.
In many cases, additives in an aged lubricant should be reconstructed. Rather than disposing of all the oil and then replacing it, a far more economical approach would be to only replace the offending degraded additive. Although this practice may bring criticism from lubricant marketers, there are reputable companies that can help make good science-based decisions.
SKF is one such organization increasing the overall life expectancy of lubricating oils while reducing the total lubrication cost for the company. Developed by an expert team of chemists and processing engineers, the SKF RecondOil program uses a specialized chemical booster to attract dirt and separate it from the oil, effectively regenerating the oil for further use. By revitalizing and reusing quality lubricants, companies can begin to see a reduction in the overall amount being spent on their oil.
3. Optimizing the Relube Interval
Don’t change a lubricant too soon or too late. Many lubricants are changed using regimented practices or simple guesswork. This is usually the case with automotive oil and filter changes. It is also true with the vast majority of industrial lubricant applications. Frequently, lubricant sumps are purged and recharged far too soon.
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Use oil analysis as your metric to optimize the interval and avoid premature disposal of an expensive commodity. For instance, if the oil is analyzed at the end of a typical service interval and the remaining useful life (RUL) is found to be 75 percent, extend the interval for the next drain and charge. Keep fine-tuning the interval until an optimum interval is established with reasonable margin for error.
Many machines should not be subject to interval-based oil changes at all. Instead, their lubes should be changed “on condition” and only when there is a true need. Let the oil tell you when it needs to be changed, not the calendar. Condition-based oil changes make the most sense for large sumps of expensive lubricants and/or those requiring periodic top-ups.
In certain applications, grease lubrication can also be optimized from the standpoint of the relube frequency and amount. This can be done using grease analysis (with proper sampling) but also by inspecting used grease in bearing and motor rebuilds.
The amount and condition of the grease in these bearings can offer insightful information for optimizing the relube interval and volume.
4. Reducing Package Waste
Many lubricants sold in drums and packages fail to get fully consumed. Frequently, unused lubricant is left behind in the package. Various strategies can help to minimize waste oil, including using smaller packages or bulk oil. These tactics should be optimized for the machine or group of machines in which the lubricant is used.
Another culprit of waste is the top-up container. These small containers that are carried to the point of lubricant application are often partially full when they are set aside. The oil left in the container is later questioned regarding its type and condition.
This doubt commonly leads to the oil being dispensed into a waste oil container. To prevent this from occurring, make it a practice to label the condition and grade of top-up residuals.
5. Reducing Leakage
Leakage control makes good sense for a number of reasons. Not only are there lubricant consumption savings but also reliability and safety benefits. Don’t turn a blind eye to leakage; address it early. Avoid Band-Aid fixes, and instead seek permanent and complete solutions.
The table above offers a hypothetical example of the potential for reducing lubricant consumption and overall annual lubricant spending. The opportunities vary considerably depending on the current amount of waste and inefficiency in your plant.
If you are uncertain of your potential for savings, hire a specialist to perform an assessment that benchmarks your current practices to the optimum reference state (best practice).
As previously stated, it’s not necessarily about buying cheaper lubricants but rather the optimum selection of lubricants and a proactive strategy for reducing lubricant consumption. Once these efficiencies are put in place, the savings you gain will recur each year, resulting in a nice annuity with minimal effort and investment..
People know even less about oil additives than they do about fuel additives. Maybe it's because people forget about their oil since they only think about it when it's time to change it every 3 months or so. Oil doesn't have that "top of mind awareness" that fuel does because drivers see how much gas they use every time they fill up. Some even keep track of the costs every time they fill up, too. But consider that even if you don't think about it often, the health of the engine oil is more important to the life of the vehicle than fuel ever was. And that means oil additives are essential to the long-life and value of the vehicle.
What kinds of oil additives are there? Are they any good? Let's look at an overview of the situation.
Most oil already comes with additives
Engine manufacturers have done lots of testing to try and figure out what is needed from a lubricating oil to protect the engines that they design and make. The American Petroleum Institute issues grades for engine oil that are shorthand for a certification that the particular kind of oil contains what is needed to protect a given kind of engine. These certifications are listed in letter-number format, like CI-4 and CJ-4. Your vehicle's owners manual will list the class designation of oil that is recommended for your vehicle.
It's a little known fact that common engine oils sold on the shelf already contain additives. These additives turn ordinary base oil into the kind of oil needed to provide the best protection for today's modern engines. In other words, they help oil fulfill its basic functions in the engines. What are the oil's most important functions? You would think it's all about reducing friction and wear - and you'd be mostly correct. But that's not the only thing motor oil does, by any means. It protects metal surfaces from particulate wear, keeps acids under control, and even performs the essential function of keeping the engine cool by helping to dissipate heat away from engine surfaces.
To help, detergents, dispersants, anti-acids, friction modifiers and viscosity modifiers are always included in the additive packages that come standard with today's oils. And they all fulfill specific roles in helping the oil provide the best protection possible.
Detergents keep metal surfaces clean by removing sludge contaminants. Dispersants work in conjunction with detergents to give the oil the ability to take particle impurities (like dirt or soot in the engine) and suspend them in the oil film, away from metal surfaces, so they don't cause damage. Anti-acids are a broad class of additives that neutralize the acids produced in the engine environment. Without them, these acids would cause corrosion and damage in the engine. Viscosity modifiers are used to help the engine oil maintain the best viscosity across the broadest range of temperatures and conditions that the oil is likely to face. And friction modifiers (like ZDDP) are added to improve the oil formula's ability to cope with high pressure conditions.
So which engine oil additive is best?
Given these facts, what we really want to know is whether we should pay any extra for any of these "aftermarket" oil additives sold off the shelf. To make a good decision, you have to know what you're buying and what it will actually do vs. what it claims to do or what you're expecting it to do. Let's take a look at the general categories of common oil additives. Note that any product names that we happen to mention are the sole property and copyright of their respective manufacturer(s).
Oil stabilizers and viscosity modifiers
- Lucas makes some very popular treatments that work to improve the lube oil's stability across a range of temperatures and conditions. Generally speaking, these kind of products work fairly well, but the consumer should be cautious about the kinds of claims that are implied by these products. There is a difference between correctly claiming that boosting the antioxidant level in an oil will make it last longer, and making additional claims that doing so will improve gas mileage by, say, 10%. We're not saying Lucas specifically says this, but there are similar products out there that have no qualms about doing just that (what could they be? Well, we know that one of them is a "mystery").
Extreme wear additives
- examples of this can be Dura Lube or Slick 50. These will try to improve or extend the oil's extreme pressure protection capacity, typically by supplementing the "EP" additives already present. Their working mechanism revolves around some version of bonding to or coating of metal surfaces with something that makes them "extra slippery". Dura Lube and similar products use an old technology called chlorinated paraffin. Slick 50 was famous in the 80s and 90s for claiming to use Teflon ("the world's slipperiest substance") to reduce friction in the engine. We're not here to break down all the claims for these types of additives, but one should be aware that most of these companies have gotten into trouble over unsubstantiated claims of large benefits to the engines they're used in.
Because we (Bell Performance) make an oil additive, we'll have consumers asking us how ours compares to products like Lucas or Prolong or STP oil treatment. It's hard to do comprehensive testing to verify all the claims made by every product out in the marketplace, though we did do an very interesting extreme pressure protection study with some aftermarket products a few years ago. So you might be thinking that what we're saying is you can't really know what's best. Our advice to consumers trying to decide is to be cautious about product claims, especially claims relating to how an oil additive may boost mileage. Certainly, a healthy oil supply is a lot better for engine performance and life than old worn-out dirty oil. And you could get some mileage boost, but you're never going to buy or use an oil additive just because you want better mileage. You will get the most benefit and bang for your buck if you buy and use oil additives with the expectation that it's going to augment the benefits you're already getting from your base oil, all while making sure that you do the proper oil change schedule for your vehicle. No oil additive is going to be able to overcome sloppy maintenance practices.
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