Through years of experience, we found that more likely than not clients benefit more when they invest in a pump set vs a standalone pump. This guide will walk you through the benefits of a pump set and how to know which solution is best for your pumping needs.
Pumps don’t work alone. Nearly every pump you’ll get from any supplier will have a motor, base, coupling, and guard – all critical components that must work together for a pump to operate correctly. For a functioning pump system, though, in most cases the pump and motor assembly engineers and users call our us for help selecting is just the beginning. From controls to valves to instrumentation, there can be dozens of other components to select and coordinate, and all those components have to be assembled together in an overall design that assures everything is correctly installed and will work together as a functional unit. Just selecting all the parts for pump set like this can be a time consuming task, and there is little assurance that the system will work as a whole until it is installed and first tested.
This guide will walk you through a better option: an engineered pump set.
What Is A Pump Set?
A pump set is a pre-planned, coordinated assembly of all components needed to perform a particular fluid handling task, or application, factory assembled and tested to assure rapid installation, and provided by a single vendor responsible for the whole assembly.
Common examples of fluid handling applications are chemical metering or dosing, pressure boosting or constant pressure delivery, liquid transfer, and more. Pump Sets are often engineered to fit the needs of a particular installation.
Benefits Of Investing In A Pump Set
There are 3 key benefits of investing in a pump set over a standalone pump:
- Single source responsibility and coordination
- Simplified, Labor-saving installation
- High quality, documented design
When it comes to any system, coordination is key. An effective pump installation relies not only on the pump but how well it works with the:
- Motors, couplings, guards
- Pump and Pump Set Base, Provisions for lifting, anchoring, support
- Piping, fittings, sealants, gaskets, welding
- Check Valves, isolation valves, control valves
- Gauges
- Strainers, straightening vanes, diffusers
- Controls, wiring, programming, actuators, sequences of operation, operator interfaces
- Instrumentation for the application flow, temperature, pressure, conductivity, viscosity, pH
- Enclosures, freeze protection, ventilation
- And more, depending on the application
When you focus solely on the pump, and not the entire system that is supporting it, you can easily run into problems and not attain the desired outcomes. By choosing a full system solution, everything you need to create an effective pumping solution is selected, coordinated, assembled and factory tested as a single unit so you can be confident the system works appropriately. A complete fabricated system can go through a more robust sequence of factory tests, providing a better representation of the pump’s performance in the field.
The second key benefit of choosing a pump set is a direct result of the coordination step. A pump set offers significant cost savings on installation since the unit as a whole is designed, developed and tested for effectiveness. By the time the solution arrives at your facility, the system simply needs to be set in place, connected to field piping, connected to power and it’s good to go! You are not paying an engineering team to figure out the nuances of your existing system and how to get the new pump to fit into that space. A field erected system requires a lot of trial and error to get the system functioning properly and high downtimes can be detrimental to a business.
A coordinated pump set also offers a higher quality system design over a standalone pump. Again, since the full system is designed at once to work in a specific way, the outcome naturally results in higher quality and performance. An added bonus is that should any piece of the full system not work as expected, you contact your system engineer for a solution rather than contacting each of the product’s manufacturers who don’t know how their equipment is being used within the context of the entire system environment.
Scenarios When A Standalone Pump Purchase Makes Sense
In most cases, a pump set is your best solution for long-term success and cost-savings. If you get to a point in time where your pump needs to be completely replaced on an existing system, chances are other elements of that system are also in need of repair or replacement. On the other hand, if you are building a completely brand new system, there is little need to spend the additional time on coordination when you can outsource that to experts who will likely complete the coordination at a faster and more accurate rate.
However, in the event that a relatively newer system needs a replacement pump and that same or very similar pump model still exists, then you can likely invest in a replacement piece and get your system back to working at peak functionality. This is where having a relationship with a trusted engineer proves extremely valuable, as they will provide the best recommendation for replacement (either pump or full system) based on your current environment and pumping challenges.
Additionally, in the case that you need an extremely large pump or the pump set cannot fit together on a truck for delivery, a standalone pump is likely the best option. The caveat, however, is that the field installation should be reviewed by an experienced pump application engineer.
Do You Need A Coordinated Pump Set?
At Geiger, we maintain pump-specific engineering staff on premises to give you unparalleled pump application support. We are not just buying a pump and putting it in a system – we have extensive, hands-on experience selecting, applying, repairing, and troubleshooting pumps. Additionally, we are a stocking distributor of market leading pumps, including Viking Pumps, and the common components for complete pump sets.
Contact us today and with speak with one of our engineers!