Wilkes Plumbing & Heating Featured In Plastics Technology

Wilkes was honored to be featured in this issue of Plastics Techonology

What a plastics plant actually needs from a mechanical contractor

A plastics processing plant runs on its utilities long before it runs on resin. Chilled water has to hold a stable temperature at the tool, or parts drift out of tolerance and the scrap rate tells on you by the end of the shift. Compressed air has to be clean and dry. Cooling towers, chillers, and the process water loops between them carry away the heat that extrusion and injection molding put into the material. Every one of those loops is pipe, pumps, valves, and controls that somebody has to size, fabricate, and install correctly.

That is the work our industrial group does. Industrial process piping covers the process cooling loops, chilled and tower water, compressed air distribution, and the pump and manifold assemblies that tie them together. We fabricate in our own shop in Huron, where fit and weld quality are controlled on a bench instead of overhead on a ladder, and set the assemblies during a planned outage. On the air side, industrial HVAC work covers process cooling, make-up air, and the ventilation that keeps a press floor workable in August.

Two things matter more here than almost anywhere else

Uptime. A line down is scrap plus lost production, and it is usually the larger number. Work in a running plant gets planned backward from the shutdown window and staffed to finish inside it, with the tie-ins sequenced so the line comes back in a known order.

Temperature stability. A loop that holds setpoint is a quality system, not just a comfort system. Correct pipe sizing, balanced circuits, and controls that actually match the load are what keep the tool at temperature when ambient conditions move.

If you have a plant utility project in front of you, send the drawings or a rough scope to our team, or call (419) 433-2325.