Unpopular opinion: people are running their dredge pumps way too fast and burning out seals in half the time

Last month I had a guy bring his pump in with a blown seal after only 80 hours and when I asked him his RPM he said max throttle, so I showed him the manual where it says to run at 75% for sandy conditions and he argued with me for 10 minutes before I pulled the spec sheet - has anyone else noticed this trend of operators thinking more speed equals more production?

2 comments

2 Comments

sethc1218d ago

80 hours on a seal is rough, I've definitely been that guy who thought more throttle was the answer (until I cooked a seal on my own pump in 50 hours). It makes sense when you see the spec sheet but in the moment everyone thinks they know better than the manual, you know? At some point I just learned to trust the numbers and my repair bills dropped way off.

tessa_roberts118d ago

Learned that lesson the hard way too, except I managed to blow up a seal in like 30 hours because I thought running the pump wide open all the time was just being efficient. Turns out I was just being the guy who thinks he's smarter than the engineer who designed the thing, right? My wallet definitely let me know I was wrong after that repair bill came in. These days I just set the throttle where the manual says and pretend I know what I'm doing, even if it feels slow.