Why Should You Balance Your Fan After Installation?

Visit https://airprofan.com/ - Call 715-365-3267 - Email [email protected]

We all feel a little worse for the wear after a long road trip. Why take your chances on a balancing act with your newly shipped industrial fan?

AirPro Sales Manager / Senior Application Engineer Chet White shares why it’s so important to balance your fan after installation in this quick whiteboard video.

Full Transcript:

You received a brand new fan. It’s shiny and looks really great. You’re about to plug it into your industrial application, and two days from now it’s going to be real dusty, messy, and hopefully running forever.

So why,, at startup, should you balance a fan? It’s a question I get a lot. “I got a brand new fan - you guys are supposed to balance it.” And the answer to your question, we do balance it. But what can often happen between shipping and your receiving, that fan is handled. There’s no way we can absolutely guarantee that there weren’t problems in the handling of the fan that have caused it to come out of balance from how we shipped it.

So the main reason why I recommend you balance fans at startup is so you can spend a little bit of money getting someone in to balance the fan so you don’t have to spend a lot of money dealing with problems that come with operating an unbalanced fan. Now, I’ll admit, most customers do not balance fans at startup, and most of the time it’s OK. But, there have been times… let me demonstrate this real quick.

You receive a fan and you have a shaft and bearing, let’s say it has a belt drive coming off of it, a motor (that’s actually not a very good motor, but you’ve got the motor) and you’ve got the fan (not very central to the fan but oh well, you get the picture). You’ve received the fan, here’s your inlet, and a lot of fans have a bushing connection on the end of it. And what we’re going to do is take a bushing and we’re going to install the wheel to the shaft using a bushing, and so when we torque that thing down, it’s three screws or three bolts a lot of times, and we’re torquing down right here to connect your bushing to your shaft, we’re torquing that down.

Well, say again, as this fan is being shipped, the shipper drops it, but not bad enough that there is any structural damage that you can see, but it was bad enough, maybe it just shook this enough, that it loosens one of the bolts. The last thing you want when you fire this thing up is to find that you’ve got a shaky bolt, your bushing coming off, and your wheel just free spinning inside that housing, because a lot of damage can come from that. That’s one reason you balance after you receive the fan.

Another is if it is out of balance, now you fire it up and run it at high vibration levels, and at high vibration levels, one of these two bearings is likely to fail sooner than you want. If one bearing fails, the other bearing often fails. If the other bearing fails, if your inboard is the one that fails, your shaft can drop, your wheel can contact your cone, and now you have a situation where you have to replace the cone, the wheel, the bushing, the shaft, and the bearings. I promise you that is a lot more expensive than just getting your fan balanced at startup. So I recommend and highly suggest you balance your fan at startup.


VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://airprofan.com/
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL:    / @airprofan  
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR EMAIL LIST: https://airprofan.com/contact/

LET’S CONNECT!
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn:   / airpro-fan-and-blower  

#centrifugalfan #industrialfan #manufacturing