Shipyards depend on pressure safety and relief valves engineered for extreme shipboard environments, but valves are only as good as you keep them. Regular maintenance and inspection are essential to preventing costly unexpected downtime for your most critical shipbuilding projects, ensuring reliability in mission-critical shipboard systems, and preventing damage to equipment or even injury to personnel due to overpressure.
In this article, we will answer your questions about relief valve inspection, maintenance, and repair so you can make the most out of your investment in high-performance industrial valves.
The Benefits of Relief Valve Inspection
Relief valves protect your equipment from overpressure, but like any other critical safety component, they need attention to ensure they are still functioning to system requirements. Without regular inspection and maintenance, normal wear and tear over time can catch you by surprise—and its consequences can include leaks, improper seating, operational inefficiencies, or even safety hazards and downtime.
Regularly sending in your valves for professional relief valve inspection services puts them in the hands of experts with training, vast technical knowledge, and access to specialized testing and calibration tools that enable them to ensure that your valves are set to the correct pressure limits, operate within required tolerances, and meet legal and safety requirements for your industry.
How often should relief valves be inspected?
Like a human body, safety and relief valves generally benefit the most from annual inspections in general. Yearly relief valve inspections are usually sufficient for catching early signs of wear, corrosion, or other performance issues before they evolve into large-scale reliability or safety concerns.
However, if your valves handle pressure relief for mission-critical shipboard systems in especially demanding or intense environments, you might want to have your valves inspected every six months—if not more frequently.
Valves that see heavy use need more frequent inspections if they handle:
- Especially corrosive media
- High-temperature fluids
- Fluids under high pressures
In these environments, a valve’s critical mechanisms will wear out much faster than a valve that sees much lighter use and gentler operating conditions. Signs of wear and tear will appear much sooner, with significantly shorter intervals between those telltale warning signs popping up and eventual reliability issues or catastrophic failures in the future.
To prevent failures from catching you off-guard and causing extensive and costly unplanned downtime, relief and safety valves that operate as workhorses for mission-critical systems in intense shipboard environments should be inspected twice a year, or even more frequently.
Can you repair safety and relief valves?
When your relief valve’s inspection turns up warning signs of potential issues—wear, stress cracks or deformation, corrosion, etc.—you will want to address them as soon as possible. Kicking the can down the road to the next inspection can lead to unexpected breakdowns.
Replacing a high-quality, high-performance product such as a safety or relief valve can be pricey, and that price tag especially stings if your valve’s lifetime has been shorter than the average 10 to 20 years you were expecting.
However, there is an alternative. Valve repair services can fix problems that crop up during an inspection and breathe new life into old valves. Repaired valves will function just as well as brand-new valves, and repair can cost up to 50% less than replacement. Repair services also often have much shorter lead times—getting your operations back on track faster.
Dante Valve: Trusted Experts in Relief Valve Inspection and Repair
As a factory-authorized loose assembler of both ASME-certified and non-code valves, Dante Valve is a partner you can count on for reliable, fast-turnaround relief valve inspection and repair services.
Ready to schedule your next valve inspection? Here’s what to do:
- Send your valves to our VR Valve Repair certified technicians in our Bellflower, California production facility for inspection and evaluation.
- If the inspection turns up problems with your valves, we provide a repair estimate based on the extent of the damage.
- Our technicians repair your valves, test them, and certify them to ensure they will continue to meet your industry standards.