There are a lot of challenges that come with maintaining piping systems. However, the best way to minimize these challenges is to ensure you have a proper maintenance plan in place. You need to maintain everything from safety valves to pressure release valves. While pressure-reducing valves won’t typically fail, they are crucial for safety, meaning they must also be on your checklists. Here are some top piping maintenance tips.

Determine What Needs to Be Inspected

This is the most crucial step in your piping system maintenance. You need to know what needs inspecting and how it should be inspected. For instance, some aspects of your piping can be checked out by just walking around and visually checking to see if everything is working as it should. On the other hand, some components will need you to manually test to see if they are working. This is the case with operational and safety valves.

Formulate with a Schedule for Your Maintenance Team

Once you know what needs to be maintained and how the checks should be done, you must then come up with a schedule or maintenance plan for your team. This will divide some tasks into daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly. Daily tasks might involve general checks to see if there is any corrosion or chemicals on the floor, while weekly tasks involve cleaning the piping system and applying chemicals that prevent corrosion. On the other hand, with monthly tasks, you can get into the replacement of components. It’s advisable to replace all your components with forged parts where possible. According to a study done by the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department at the University of Toledo, forged parts are 26% stronger than cast parts when it comes to handling tensile forces.

Create a Quarterly Piping Checklist

This will probably be your most extensive check. For this, you can look into components of the piping system like threaded fittings, clamps, flanges, brackets, and other fittings. You must also inspect all indoor piping and everything in tunnels and crawlspaces. Don’t forget to check out your piping system for loose or leaky fittings. Lastly, you will also want to inspect for any signs of corrosion in the system.

These are some of the top piping system maintenance tips you should consider. You must never neglect maintenance tasks as this will help you catch some problems before they develop into costly complications.