Let us Help You get the Right Motor for the Right Application

A Decatur Industrial customer needed a suitable 800 HP motor replacement to go inside a large coal fired power plant. The current motor had quite a bit of age and special features, which made it an involved process when looking to buy a new replacement.

This motor is used in a coal conveyor system, transporting coal from the barge on the river to the plant for electrical energy production. In addition to being out in the weather, this motor requires coal dust protection for fire and explosion safety reasons.

We engaged with our partnered motor manufacturer to address the dust and safety concerns, ensuring the customer is abiding with all operational safety codes. Furthermore, we were able to consider size differences and crane/hoist considerations with the customer.

By ensuring that our product offering is correct for the customer environment and application we were able to help them avoid purchasing an incorrectly specified custom above NEMA motor. The savings based on the motor cost alone is over $100,000.

Discover the difference with you buy from us direct.

• Application assistance
• Distributor pricing advantage
• We service what we sell
• Installation & commissioning support
• Storage and maintenance program
• Reliability & condition monitoring services
• 24 / 7 delivery
• HUGE inventory on-site

The Decatur Industrial Electric field service crew received a video from a customer along with a request to come on-site and balance a fan immediately on an emergency basis.

The simple video and conversation between our technician and the customer highlighted some issues that needed to be addressed before the time and expense of dynamic balancing was needed.

The customer was able to fix the problem and schedule a fan precision balance during a scheduled outage, without emergency costs associated.

See what happened by watching this short video. 

This Decatur Industrial customer had a failure on a critical 500HP air compressor. While the compressor was in the shop for a recondition, they wanted to install a new motor in the application.  Unfortunately, the compressor OEM had provided a “custom” motor that was now obsolete  No motor manufacturer currently builds a “standard” motor to fit in their present base .  The customer could not wait for a manufacturer to redesign a one-off motor, which would be extremely expensive and with a lengthy lead time, so D.I.E. went to work on a standard motor retrofit design.

Our technicians worked with plant engineering and maintenance personnel to provide an available motor that would meet performance specifications .  We fabricated a steel plating that would adapt the new motor to the base, performed the actual machining of the adapter plates on the customer site to ensure a proper fit, and we modified the junction box to fit customer connections without modifications. This retrofit gave the customer the ability to adapt ANY motor to the fit the application in the future if needed.

The cost to engineer the design and fabricate the existing style base to accept the new motor cost the customer $10,000 – saving them tens of thousands of dollars in downtime and custom motor manufacturing.

Springtime means scheduled plant outages. Scheduling maintenance outages is more complicated that in the past, with many customers in need of more team members.

One of those customers found themselves lacking primarily in skilled millwrights. Knowing that it takes a lot of time to find that kind of talent, they turned to Decatur Industrial to fill the gaps. This facility required a planned daily outage once a week. However, they had been consistently short on manpower to accomplish the job. As a partner to this customer, we offered our millwright services so they could meet their plant performance goal. 

To date, we have logged over 40, 40- hour weeks of millwright work at the customer site. Our team enjoys knowing that our efforts have helped enabled the plant to hit production numbers.

Decatur Industrial has the talent on our team to help customers keep on schedule with items they don’t have the manpower to achieve.  Contact us today to see how we can provide technical services with an upcoming outage.

We can do extensive multi-point inspections of all your rotating equipment, but sometimes the biggest problems are the easiest to find.

To put it simply, the goal of a motor maintenance program is to stop problems before they occur!  Preventive motor maintenance on a regular basis can help prevent motors to fail and thus, prevent unexpected production stops. That’s where WE come in!

With this customer, Decatur Industrial works with them to run a motor maintenance program.  Our techs are trained to check for overheating of motors, bearing failures, and many other potential issues.

In this picture you see a cracked coupling.  Our technician spotted this on a schedule walk-around. We were able to avoid this near failure as well as safety issue. It could have sent debris or coupling pieces flying.

The customer was able to avoid a failure (and potential safety incident) and have it replaced quickly.