How Hydroscand Reduce Costly Downtime Through Effective Hose Maintenance

Forklift trucks are an expensive asset to your company. You invest in them because you need them to keep things moving. The last thing you want in your busy operation is for your FLT to be out of service. Downtime is expensive. Estimates on the cost of downtime range from ￡500 to as much as ￡5,000 per hour depending on the size of your business.

The best way to reduce downtime caused by hydraulic hose failure is to carry out regular maintenance checks on your hoses. By replacing your hoses before they burst, thereby not only increasing the life expectancy of your hose but saving time and money and decreasing the hours you are not able to use your forklift.

It is good practice at the start of each day to carry out daily inspections and visual checks of hydraulic hose lines. This way, you can minimise hose failures and call a technician quickly if there is a problem.

Forklift trucks are essential to keeping goods moving and our team have the experience and expertise to replace broken hoses quickly, minimising your downtime.

Jason Bray, HoseExpress Development Manager at Hydroscand UK, explains: “Due to the design of forklift trucks hoses, especially on mast hydraulic hoses, are constantly under tension to enable the hoses to run smoothly over guide rollers and through clamps. Over time, due to the nature of how forklifts operate, these hoses can ‘stretch’ and ‘crack’ the outer cover of old hose assemblies. By doing daily visual checks this can be prevented by ensuring hoses are tensioned correctly.

“Hydroscand mobile hydraulic engineers while on site replacing an old hose due to failure or hose fatigue, will ensure that all hoses are visually checked for fatigue and report findings to our customer. It is about understanding why hydraulic hose has failed and supplying a solution that can prevent this from happening again. This could be for various reasons. For example:

• General wear and tear????????????????????????????
• Original hose too long for the application required
• Rubbing or ‘catching’
• Incorrect routing of original hose assembly”

Our mobile hose technicians have been called out on numerous occasions to replace side shift hoses, auxiliary hoses, and several high-pressure hydraulics hoses on Combi Lift drive circuits on forklift trucks for our customers.

One Mobile Hose Technician at our Birmingham branch, attended a job where the customer needed a repair on a forklift. He replaced two side shift hoses and cleaned up the spilled hydraulic oil. He said: “I left the job with happy customers, ready to start their days work.”

Jason Bray said: “The Managing Director of a local company called me as the side shift hoses on their forklift truck had failed. I inspected the hoses and discovered the hoses had been incorrectly routed. I had a look at routing the hose assemblies differently and after turning valve adaptors 90 degrees, new hoses were now free from being caught. Sometimes the best solution is the simplest.”

Josh Legg, Mobile Hose Technician from our Southampton branch also replaced side shift hoses on a forklift. Josh said: “We always have our customers’ needs in mind, which helps to reduce their downtime and ensures they work efficiently.”

When Josh inspected the old hoses, he discovered they had failed because they had been rubbing together. When Josh replaced the hoses, he wrapped plastic hose protection onto the new hoses to avoid abrasion prolonging the life of the new hoses. “Our customer was very happy with the result.”

Craig George, one of our long-term customers said: “There are hundreds of hoses that can fail on combi lifts. We use Hydroscand as they are a first-time fix. I will call Jason Bray and the job is done. I would never use anyone else apart from Hydroscand, and their prices are reasonable too. They have an electronic system, so, you can see what they have done and how they have done it.”

If you need our reliable and trusted hose technicians to replace hoses on your fork lift truck or any other machine, call us on 0800 0116 999 or visit:?https://www.hydroscand.co.uk/uk_en/branches

#Downtime #HoseRepair #HoseMaintenance #ForkLift #FLT #Hydroscand