Hose Covers & Safety
Hose Covers and Safety
January, 2019
Raise your hand if you prefer a hose to fail shortly after installing it?
If I had to guess, no one would raise their hand for that.
Proper hose selection ensures a hose reaches its maximum working life and allows operators to work in a safe environment with limited risks of burns and other injuries.
Certain selection criteria should be considered before purchasing any hose such as:
- Media
- Temperature
- Type of application (dynamic/static).
We will review core selection criteria later in our hose blog series but first, let’s take a look at a hose component many people often ignore: Covers.
Hose covers provide benefits to a plants safety and identification programs. Some of the benefits are:
- Safety
- Employee protection from hot sources
- There are numerous cases of employees brushing up against a hose carrying a hot media, such as steam, and burning themselves. This causes issues for the plant as well as preventable injuries to plant personnel which could leave the plant low on labor.
- Hose cover options for absorbing and preventing the dissemination of heat to the external cover include
- Employee protection from hot sources
- Identification
- Traceability to specific areas of a plant by tag
- Traceability is a critical step to any plants part management process.
- Tags are available that provide up to 5 lines of details. Some tag options even exist for RFID technology.
- Media identification by color
- Spiral wrap or silicone covers in various colors help identify a specific process within a plant.
- For instance, some plants accept blue as the color to represent Nitrogen. These plants could have a blue spiral wrap to signal nitrogen is flowing through a hose.
- a thermal sleeve or fire sleeve which assist in the reduction of heat transfer.
- Traceability to specific areas of a plant by tag
- Longevity/Performance
- Proper insulation to ensure temperature loss is minimized
- Often times, media is transferred through a hose while needing to maintain a specific temperature for either measurement or process requirements.
- Hose covers exists to ensure the thermal properties are maintained. If exact temperatures are required, electrically traced heat wrap is available as well.
- Additional hose “hoop” strength
- Hoop strength is the ability to bend a hose further without risk of kinking
- Hoses are manmade, and can be man destroyed—but, you have the option to make it harder for man to destroy.
- Covers exist that decrease the likelihood of a kinked hose by providing hose cores with more hoop strength.
- Proper insulation to ensure temperature loss is minimized