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Used equipment offers two attractions. First, you can avoid delivery delays incurred when ordering some new equipment. This may provide significant schedule savings — even as much as six months or more — in procurement. Having a unit quickly up and running again frequently is worth a lot. Second, used equipment costs less, sometimes a lot less. However, if issues arise with the equipment, cost savings can dwindle or disappear. Getting used equipment to the plant and properly working requires different skills than those for purchasing new items. So, let’s look at potential problems and also a situation where used equipment proved a bad bargain.
First, though, let’s distinguish between remanufactured and used equipment. Remanufactured equipment undergoes reconditioning to a “like new” state by the original equipment manufacturer or a specialist vendor and generally comes with a warranty. Commonly available remanufactured equipment includes control valves and pumps.
In contrast, used equipment mainly consists of items from shuttered plants. You usually purchase such equipment as-is (or perhaps after cleaning) and where-is. The item may have sat idle for years or longer, rarely comes with any warranty or performance guarantee, and often lacks mechanical or process design documentation.
If the name plate is readable, you may be able to get (generally for a fee) original design mechanical details from the manufacturer, if it’s still in business. However, you won’t know the effect of any subsequent repairs or modifications.
The process requirements for the new service nearly always differ from the original ones. You may need expert-level knowledge to decide if the equipment really will suffice.
If you’re fortunate enough to find an item very closely matching what you need, then you can save money. However, don’t count on saving much if you incur significant repair, reconditioning and engineering costs.
The experience of a site that bought a surplus 42-in.-dia. distillation tower exemplifies what can go wrong. That packed column, which had been built at a pharmaceutical plant but never placed into service, had sat idle for years. The tower was sold without any documentation on its internals; no mechanical or process details were available on internals configuration or original design rates, conditions or physical properties.
The tower was loaded horizontally onto a truck, shipped well over a thousand miles to its new home, unloaded and then erected. At no time, did anyone inspect the column’s internal condition.
The tower failed to perform on startup. Troubleshooting quickly ran into hurdles: What were the internals? What range of liquid and vapor rates could they handle? What was their mechanical condition? No one knew.
