Repair or Replace? What Our Ashland Shop Can Do With Your Worn Pump
The pump in the first photo came into our shop looking like it had been pulled off the bottom of a river. Heavy rust on the upper casing, flaking paint, scale caked around the bearing housing, and decades of hard service written all over it.
The pump in the second photo is the same unit on its way back to the customer.
That is what a good rebuild looks like, and it is something our Ashland, Virginia repair shop does every week. We have refurbished hundreds of pumps over the years, and in a lot of those cases the customer saved a significant amount of money compared to buying new.
Not Every Worn Pump Needs to Be Replaced
When a pump starts losing performance, the first instinct is often to replace it. Sometimes that is the right call. A lot of the time it is not.
Large pumps like the horizontal split case unit shown here are built with heavy cast casings designed to last for decades. The casing is usually the most expensive part of the pump, and it is often still in good shape even when the pump is running poorly. What wears out is the rotating assembly and the parts around it: wear rings, sleeves, bearings, seals, and packing.
Replace those, restore the clearances, and the pump goes back to doing what it was designed to do.
Repair also has a few advantages that are easy to overlook:
- No repiping. A rebuilt pump drops back into the same footprint with the same flange locations. No new baseplate, no piping changes, no surprises.
- Faster turnaround. Lead times on large new pumps can stretch for months. A rebuild is often much quicker.
- Known performance. If the pump was correctly sized for your system, a rebuild returns that original performance rather than introducing a new variable.
What Happens When Your Pump Comes Into Our Shop
1. Teardown and inspection. We take the pump completely apart and inspect every component. Casings, impellers, shafts, sleeves, wear rings, bearings, and seal areas all get a close look.
2. Honest assessment. We tell you what we found and what it will take to fix it. If a repair makes sense, we quote it. If the pump is past the point where a rebuild is worth the money, we tell you that too and help you select the right replacement.
3. Cleaning and surface prep. Old coatings, rust, and scale come off. The interior photo above shows a split case lower half after cleaning and coating, with the machined sealing surfaces and bearing fits exposed and ready for inspection.
4. Machining and parts replacement. Worn components are replaced or machined back to spec. Wear ring clearances get set correctly, because that one measurement has a lot to do with how efficiently the pump runs and how long the rebuild lasts.
5. Reassembly, coating, and testing. The pump goes back together, gets a fresh protective coating, and is checked before it ships back to you ready for installation.
When Replacement Is the Better Answer
We are not going to rebuild a pump just because we can. Replacement usually makes more sense when:
- The casing is cracked or badly eroded
- Parts are no longer available and would have to be custom made at high cost
- The pump was never sized correctly for the system in the first place
- Your process conditions have changed enough that a different pump would run more efficiently
If a pump has been a chronic bad actor, we will look at why it keeps failing before we recommend anything. Sometimes the fix is a rebuild. Sometimes it is a new selection. Sometimes it is the piping.
Send Us Your Worn Pump
Wood Equipment Company has been in the pump business since 1945. Our factory trained technicians repair centrifugal, positive displacement, split case, and end suction pumps from a wide range of manufacturers for industrial, municipal, and commercial customers.
Send us your worn pump and we will give you an honest repair vs. replace assessment. The before and after results speak for themselves.
Contact us today: Phone: 804.798.8844 Email: sales@woodequip.com Address: 10540 Northlake Park Drive, Ashland, VA 23005 Web: woodequip.com