Maintenance is all about the potential of the printing press. However, it is also worth taking a look at the bigger picture – the pressroom.
Maintenance and servicing are key factors for ensuring smooth, energy-efficient operations in the pressroom. Given the long operating hours there, the efficiency of equipment and systems has a major impact on the use of resources in your company. Therefore, when older equipment needs to be repaired, it makes sense to replace it.
Moreover, opting to replace equipment that is still in working order, but guzzles energy, may also be worth your while. Technical advances mean there are now products on the market that are usually much more efficient. This applies not only to the pressroom infrastructure, but also the printing press itself.
Replacing equipment is also advisable when new solutions that conserve resources are the way of the future. We’ve seen this in the past in the lighting sector, when there was a major shift from the light bulb to LED lights. There’s now a similar situation with pressroom heating, for example, where we’re seeing an ongoing paradigm shift from oil and gas to heat pumps.
The same principle applies to all HEIDELBERG machines – dedicated maintenance programs boost productivity and reduce unscheduled downtime. Thorough and, above all, regular cleaning of machines provides the basis not only for high output quality and value retention, but also for energy-efficient operations. Failing to pay proper attention to maintenance wastes money and can also have a serious impact on production (machine standstill).
Regular cleaning of dirty lamellas should form part of your maintenance schedule, and structured cleaning tasks should also be performed at the end of every shift. To save energy, it is important to carry out precise analysis to identify which tasks are carried out with the machine in standby mode and which with the machine switched off.
However, the greatest potential for saving energy lies in producing as little paper waste as possible. Each time you reduce your paper waste by one sheet, you save energy (and reduce your ecological footprint, too). We recommend that you unlock this considerable savings potential by holding a workshop focusing specifically on this issue in detail.
For example, the following steps can help you reduce paper waste:
Consistently implementing steps to reduce paper waste in your maintenance schedules can save you five-figure sums. The following example illustrates the scale of these potential savings, and you can customize the calculations by entering the values for your own operation.
Last but not least, you might well find that regularly taking a walk round the pressroom when it’s quiet, keeping your ears pricked, pays off in relation to maintenance. If you can hear a hissing noise, it may be that you, as an SME printer, are letting a five-figure sum disappear into the ether over the course of a year. After all, leaks in the compressed air system lead to significant increases in energy consumption – and in your costs.
Spring is on its way and now is the perfect time to clean your external cooler. Leaves from the fall or foreign matter can impair the cooling effect of the lamellas. The CombiStar water filter should also be cleaned regularly. If filters are dirty, the pump has to work harder. In a worst-case scenario, the machine gives up, resulting in downtime. By completing just a few tasks, you can prevent this happening.
By implementing a rigorous maintenance strategy, you will make huge improvements to energy efficiency in your company.
