In this episode, we speak to Scott Bargerstock, the Director of Manufacturing Productivity and Global Energy at Mohawk Industries which is the world's largest manufacturer of flooring. Scott oversees more than 100 plants and has been highly successful in reducing energy consumption. Tuning in, you’ll hear what Scott does on a day-to-day basis at Mohawk and how he finds and addresses opportunities across the KPIs of energy savings, waste management, and production processes. Scott talks about some of the biggest lessons he has learned in his career, debunks some of the common myths associated with energy efficiency, and reflects on the most impactful initiative he’s been involved in. Scott shares insight into how some states offer rebates for plants that meet certain criteria and explains how he stays up to date with changing federal laws. To find out the first thing Scott would recommend to anyone wanting to improve production efficiencies, as well as many helpful resources, tune in today!
In this episode, we speak to Scott Bargerstock, the Director of Manufacturing Productivity and Global Energy at Mohawk Industries which is the world's largest manufacturer of flooring. Scott oversees more than 100 plants and has been highly successful in reducing energy consumption. Tuning in, you’ll hear what Scott does on a day-to-day basis at Mohawk and how he finds and addresses opportunities across the KPIs of energy savings, waste management, and production processes. Scott talks about some of the biggest lessons he has learned in his career, debunks some of the common myths associated with energy efficiency, and reflects on the most impactful initiative he’s been involved in. Scott shares insight into how some states offer rebates for plants that meet certain criteria and explains how he stays up to date with changing federal laws. To find out the first thing Scott would recommend to anyone wanting to improve production efficiencies, as well as many helpful resources, tune in today!
EPISODE 6
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:02] MH: You're listening to The Industrial Movement, where we discuss the people, the processes, and the equipment that drives American manufacturing. If this is your first time listening, well, thanks for coming. The Industrial Movement Podcast is produced every week for your enjoyment and the show notes can be found at our website at www.theindustrialmovement.com.
Come back often and feel free to add this podcast to your favorite RSS feed or iTunes. You can also follow the show on Twitter @theindustrialmovement, or on our Facebook page. All links to our social media can be found in the show notes, and also at the bottom of our website. Now, let's get on to the show.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:40] MH: Welcome to The Industrial Movement. My name is Morty Hodge. As always, I have my trusty sidekick here, Greg Smith.
[00:00:46] GS: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:47] MH: Today, we are honored to have a special guest, Scott Bargerstock with Mohawk Industries, which is the world's largest manufacturer of flooring. Then Scott, his specific role there is the Director of Manufacturing Productivity and Global Energy. Scott, welcome to the show.
[00:01:09] SB: Well, it's a pleasure to be on and certainly appreciate the invitation and look forward to the discussion. Thank you for having me.
[00:01:17] MH: Fantastic. It's our honor. Scott, tell us a little bit about your role at Mohawk.
[00:01:23] SB: Well, initially I came into the organization with the idea of hoping to reduce our energy consumption. As a large manufacturer, we have a substantial footprint, both domestically and internationally. We've worked very diligently to identify and then solutions. We identify the problems, identify solutions. We've been very successful on gaining the confidence of executive management with respect to capital spans. We've been very successful. We've also identified several other areas that don't involve capital as well, compressed air tends to fall in that a little bit from the standpoint of we often look at what we would define as a behavior, set points, pressure set points are all always something that we found to be very flexible.
We've had very good success with the plants taking a very proactive approach to testing out different options in reducing that set point. We've even gone through that laborious calculation to confirm that the rule of thumb of two PSI pressure drop is about a 1 percent energy efficiency gain. We like the rule of thumb. It's a whole lot simpler than running the calculation.
[00:02:42] MH: It is and it's a great rule of thumb. I know that the Department of Energy in conjunction with the compressed air challenge, they were the ones – and [Inaudible 00:02:49] they were the ones that started to really formulate that. You're right, we use that all the time when we talk to customers about energy savings, that quick rule of thumb. Fantastic, so Scott, tell us a little bit about your day to day role and what you do on a day to day basis at Mohawk.
[00:03:06] SB: Of course, we always monitor our energy profile across the fleet. Most of our, we have, as Morty discussed, we're the largest flooring manufacturer in the world, but that composite is made up of a number of different flooring types, which all have very different manufacturing processes. We have the soft surface area, which is more than towards the carpet. We've also got vinyl, that resilient flooring. We have a very large presence in the laminate floor business. Then of course, we're also the world's largest ceramic tile manufacturer, at least for a few more months, one of the major competitors is going to pass this we believe due to an acquisition.
Most of our growth has come through acquisition. A lot of our plants are one offs. We certainly don't have the metering that we would like to see across the entire fleet, but we do have mechanisms to at least gauge where everybody is and where they're going. We look for anomalies. We look for continued opportunities. Then of course, this time of year, we have a large thermo energy load in the form of natural gas consumption. Of course this time of year, we're always looking at the costs and what options do we have with respect other alternate fuels and that thing. That's the day-to-day energy side.
We've also got, we have particular to the compressed air we have a control system that we've just installed in one of our medium sized plants and we're constantly looking at that to confirm where we're at energy savings wise. Also looking is there a way to improve how that interacts with our plant and the production to make improvements, an example there is we saw some erratic flow needs for the production equipment was driving down that the potential efficiency that we could gain. We've been able to work with the production folks to soften some of those peaks up. That's gained us some substantial efficiency gains. That's a nice feedback loop that we're able to use with the technology that we have.
On the manufacturing productivity side, I do a similar analysis and approach, which is to look at, where are we on our plants, production, equipment? How are we doing on productivity? We, of course, have our KPIs that we analyze and we look at those on, on both a micro and a macro level to see what changes do we need to make, that would gain us a significant gain in productivity or maybe avoid a pit hole or a pothole that we should be trying to avoid.
[00:05:46] GS: All the different KPIs you're measuring. Do you find yourself you spend more time dealing with energy savings? Is it waste management? Production processes? Which one of those, do you see that you find more opportunities?
[00:06:01] SB: It's pretty equal, Greg. We see on the energy side, of course, we look at it as a from a standpoint of “How are we doing on a production?" If we have a particular product that we're following through a plant, and we see that its energy consumption during the manufacturing process is a little higher than something else, obviously, the question comes up, is why is that? What can we do to resolve that and avoid that?
Then the timeframe ends up being pretty commensurate even on the waste side, when we're looking at a production waste. We're always looking at is, is what's my energy consumed there, because that's, of course, a commodity we will never recover. Even if we do a full recycle of the waste product, we'll never get that energy back. Even in in the form of when we evaluate waste, we were still get energy as a consideration there.
[00:06:54] GS: How many different facilities are you oversee, with these different things?
[00:06:58] SB: On the manufacturing productivity side, it's more specific to our ceramic tile manufacturing in the US. So that's eight plants. The energy side is substantially more wider than that, but it's more in the ballpark of about 100 plants. We have about 60 in North America. Then we have some in Soluth America and a considerable population in the EU, with some in Russia and Eurasia, and the far the Pacific Rim as well in New Zealand, and Australia. The energy side, we capture all the data from those plants, at least, no worse than typically a monthly basis across the globe, so we can watch and see what's going on.
[00:07:44] MH: Scott, tell us about your career journey of what brought you to Mohawk and some of the different roles you've had, and the training that you've had to get you to this point where you can speak from a place of authority when it comes to energy efficiency and manufacturing, which is honestly a true pleasure for us. But tell us a little bit about your journey that brought you to where you're at now?
[00:08:06] SB: It's a long and odd path. My degree is actually in materials engineering. So the first initial part of my career was spent doing quite a bit of area in the materials world primarily as a metallurgical engineer and manager. So I spend a lot of time, I've been with manufacturing almost my entire career. It's fortunate from that standpoint is I have a really familiar background with most of the equipment that we use or at least how it's intended to function. Certainly, the flooring has been a new challenge for me to learn, but it's been really fun.
Then I migrated into a role with nuclear power. I worked for was, had the pleasure of working for Tennessee Valley Authority, and then at a nuclear power plant, holding a number of positions there and then went on to consult for the next seven or eight years to the nuclear power industry. I've been fortunate enough to visit about three quarters of the nuclear power plants in the US and I've done the work at about half of the sites there, across the US. That gave me a really nice viewpoint from the business side. I learned a lot about financial management. I learned about, how to work better with the customer.
That unfortunately involved a lot of travel and birth of our son said that I needed to be a lot closer to home. So I was able to take a role in the maintenance area with a local lightning manufacture probably. I think both of you guys are probably old enough to remember maybe having your picture taken by Olan Mills. – I held a number of roles including the maintenance manager at the local manufacturing facility here in Chattanooga. By the time we were able to finish up that journey, they were producing all of the portraits for the entire US, all that facility. If you got some pictures taken or portraits printed and sent to you in the early 2000 timeframe that came from that plant.
Then I've worked with several foundries here in town after that plant closed, and again in it primarily in a maintenance role. Then Mohawk came calling, gave the opportunity to look at the position was initially targeted as energy on the demand side. So the role was to reduce consumption and my diverse background and equipment was very supportive of that role. I was fortunate enough to gain selection for that process. So with Mohawk we've been able to do, I tell people that I do more engineering now than I've ever done in my life. Energy is very much, there's a lot of physics involved, which is a lot of fun. There's a lot of engineering involved.
We strive to document and rather than provide estimates, we try to provide calculated savings. When we go to management, we don't say, “Hey, you can save some money.” We'll be very specific about what we believe can be saved, what the expense is, what the return is on investment is. We've gone to great lengths to become very, very robust on our financial analysis. We've got to the point where most of the financial people don't necessarily question our numbers whatsoever in meetings and evaluations. We always worked under promise and over perform.
[00:11:29] GS: When you guys come across a plant or facility, that's not quite meeting what you guys expectations as far as efficiencies, whatnot, do you have a team? Do you guys do that internally? What's that process look like?
[00:11:43] SB: Yeah. Well, what we'll typically do is, is because we have so many plants. To some degree, the energy side is not only do you have to lead the horse to water, but you have to convince the horse that they're thirsty, and that this is the best water in the world. Most of the time, the plant management the leadership team is very receptive to opportunities. The capital project needs, sometimes it's a real challenge for them, depending on what time of the year it is and where we are on the capital planning cycle. We work very hard to help them with the budget process, moving into the next year. We have the list, fortunately, my boss is very in tune with executive needs. He's a whisperer that way.
One of the things we do is, we have a capital list all the time. Populated with typically it's several hundred projects across the US fleet for opportunities for energy savings. If the call comes out to hey, we have some money, do you have any projects? The answers always, absolutely. My first year there, they made that call and we couldn't answer the bell. I told my boss, that'll never happen again and it has not. We've been able to readily do that. We work very closely with the finance folks from a standpoint on several fronts. One of them is in the capital planning. We try to gain, along Greg's line, is we'll work with the plant management team and identify which projects they think fit well into their expectations and where they want to go.
Then we'll help package those put those all together with the estimated capital needs, what the planning process would look like, what the spend forecast would look like. Then we'll get those into the planning process for the next year, or even in a long range forecast if that's more appropriate. We also again, if that last minute call comes up from a plant for a project, what do we have that's available? It's very frequent, particularly in the fourth quarter, if our spending plans a little behind target. Energy projects are thought very favorably to fill that void.
We always work on those and then we spend a lot of time as those projects come off that list due to completion, we continuously look for new projects to add. We look to leverage from one industry to the other. We find a lot of commonalities between all of our different flooring manufacturing types with respect to applications. For example, we've been looking at an application where we have a large bank of AC induction motors that range from a very high low profile or a very low profile in a very short period of time.
If you're familiar with AC Induction Motors, that's not a very good application for them. Their efficiency drops or Power Factor drops corresponding with that load. You also end up with some K-bar issues and Power Factor penalties depending on how the utility treats those. Worst case is we also have tested and found some harmonic issues as well with those. We found that at one particular plant where it was very noticeable, because the equipment total power consumption on that equipment was fairly large. As we learned about it, and we put some meters on it and gathered data, and have found some solutions and are getting ready to implement those.
We found out that we have the same type of equipment, or application and an issue with that application, literally across every flooring product type we have, and probably about half of our facilities have that type of problem. Now, the order magnitudes a little bit different, so the priority on the correction that corrective actions can be a little bit different for each one. We found the same thing. We're even in the place of we buy a lot of equipment from European manufacturers, equipment manufacturers. We've actually leveraged over to them to say, “Hey, here's a potential solution that we want to put in. What do you think?” We've had several of them have jumped on board and taken ownership of it. Some new equipment, we have scheduled to arrive later this year and into next year, we'll have that corrective action implemented.
[00:16:05] MH: Scott, when it comes down to measuring the success of a project that you're working on? Is it strictly financial? Or is there other ways that you guys go about measuring success?
[00:16:16] SB: Of course, financials, the one most people talk dollars and cents, that's usually the KPI that most people value. We also look at it, of course, as a company where we have ESG pressures. Certainly we want to have the governance to be a good corporate and world citizens. So of course, the emissions side factors in as well. We have a large, our energy consumption is such as of course, that our emissions, associated emissions are fairly large as well.
We obviously want to try to reduce those, particularly in some markets. We have a number of flooring products, where our customer are very, very attuned to the sustainability and an emissions world. We tend to prioritize those a little bit, but again, like I said, we want to leverage those across the whole fleet. We've seen use the example of the Exxon board takeover, where they had to bring in some additional folks that that are very supportive on the ESG side, so we see those same type pressures. It's something obviously, as a company we need to recognize and respond to. It's always important that we look at those. We also look at it from a standpoint of what's the upside capability? Can it be easily maintained easier with the new technology in the solution?
We as a company, we have several of our particular flooring types. Speed is a very valued commodity. If we can speed it up a little bit, you can make a name for yourself in Mohawk. We found some technologies that give us a really big upside on the speed side, as far as line speed goes. That's very attractive to the individual plant facility leadership teams, within Mohawk. We found that, that's a really good flower that you can put up and people are put a flag up and people will salute it. We like doing that one a lot.
Then another one is, can we gain a benefit by the solution? This one's particular to the compressed air market, but we have a control system that provides us really, really good visibility into what's going on with the compressors. It turns out, we're huge advocates as far as the energy folks go, but it turns out that the bigger advocate is our centralized maintenance team that does a lot of compressor work. This increased visibility into what's going on with each individual compressor and it's really morphed into some very substantial savings on the resource side and on the service side.
Just as a quick example, I'm sure you're familiar with it, but if you have an airfield or change scheduled at 5000 hours, you basically most people end up using a calendar 5000 hours. With the visibility into the machine, we can actually target the actual operating run hours. Then what we found is, when we get to the calendar 5000 hour mark, we're most often substantially way less than the run hours time.
Plus, our centralized team works out of the North Georgia area. We of course have plants all over the Southeast and Southwest US primarily. The logistics of trying to support those remote operations is greatly enhanced with this improved visibility they have. They can much better schedule and plan the support activities that are going to be going across to all those plants. This is a case where the energy tool is actually probably providing a bigger bang to the company in the standpoint of improved maintenance support for our maintenance or our compressor fleet.
[00:19:57] GS: If someone else was listening, that wanted to say, “Okay, we need to get into production efficiencies and all the things that you monitor.” What would be the first thing you would tell them to look at doing that would be the most probably be the biggest bang for the buck?
[00:20:09] MH: Like low-hanging fruit?
[00:20:10] GS: Yeah. Low-hanging fruit.
[00:20:11] SB: Low-hanging fruit. Well, certainly, you have to understand where the opportunities are. There's some tremendous resources available on various websites, Department of Energy, of course, stands out quite a bit. Some of the low hanging fruit, obviously, things like LED lights. We've retrofitted, it's probably getting – sneaking up on 10 million square feet of industrial retrofit space in the LED lighting world, so that's an easy one. Some of the behavior type things, the set points are very easy to find, certainly turning off production lines when they when they're not running production. I don't know if you've been in plants where stuff runs, and there's nobody around and there's nothing, nothing going across it, like I said, those are easy opportunities.
There's some easy ones out there, but what we found was is once we got rid of those, then it became a little bit harder, so that's where we've found, we need to do some research, we need to learn a lot about how that process actually works, how the equipment works. I'll go back to that AC induction motor, if you look at it as is how does it work the most efficiently? Okay, if I'm somewhere between 85 and 95 percent load, it's a nice steady load, that's a good application for that motor.
If the load on it is different than those conditions, then that becomes an opportunity. Then it's just a matter of identifying what could you do there. We've come up with a pretty good internal analysis tool, I believe. We found it to be very accurate, and it's very easy to use for us on looking at when an inverter or a VFD, depending on what which continent you come from, whether that makes sense for the application, so we look at those.
There's also some really good resources out there, in forums to talk to. There's things like Smart Energy International, Smart Energy decisions, there's some really, really nice communities that can use. The compressed air world, of course, you've always got KGI provides some tremendous resources on things to look at. Compressed Air Magazine or Compressed Air Practices. I think is a –
[00:22:30] MH: Compressed Air Best Practices. Yeah, Rod Smith.
[00:22:31] SB: That's a tremendous resource. They have excellent articles on stories that you can look at is, is there a similarity to us. Most of those articles I looked through and the answer is yes. It's worth going through. There's a similar, I think there's a compatriot one that looks at chillers for HVAC, as well. There's lots of resources out there, the key is looking for things that you can leverage into your operation. Then worst case is get involved with some of the DOE Support Services. The one that's, I think closest to us is North Carolina State has a tremendous amount of resources from part of the DOE there.
We've worked with university Alabama on several energy audits. We actually and I think our energy audits tend to be at a much deeper level than they were able to provide. However, they did bring some things to the table that we hadn't really focused on before that turned out to be an opportunity we were missing. One of those happened to be the use of Cog V-belts as supposed to standard V-belts. When you have a belt driven application and it's just, the Cog V-belt just has a lower slippage rate, because of that cog. You get a tighter and made up with a sheave.
We have one plant where the maintenance manager swore by him, because he expected much longer sheave life. If you're got a plant that has a lot of belt-driven equipment, sheave life and maintaining tension is really important. He was very much an advocate and the energy for him was a secondary benefit. The resources are very prevalent. It's just a matter of you have to put in the time to go find those and you have to learn them. Hopefully I answered your question, Greg. That was an excellent question.
[00:24:23] GS: No, it was fantastic. I do got a follow up, though. Out of your long list of initiatives that you wanted to get approved for 2022, hat was the top thing?
[00:24:32] SB: That's a good question. What's the top thing? Probably some, I think we're looking at this is going to be the year of the VFD in several of our flooring facilities. We've identified a lot of opportunities, where we have partially loaded fans. We have one plant where we've installed a combined heat and power set and as part of that is I have really good data down to the microsecond level. What we found is, is that we can actually see the varying loads in the plant, because we have a bunch of fairly large AC motors that are not regularly loaded. They have quite a variation in your load profile.
What we see is, is our plant load fluctuates dramatically. It makes it very difficult for us on the internal generation side to try to make sure that we have a buffer against, we certainly don't want to feed back any power into the grid, because our agreement with that utility is, is we'll be all behind the meter. It's a real challenging environment. We've identified where that equipment is and this is a challenge from a standpoint of, this is very high dollar equipment that also has a very high perceived internal value, because we don't have a lot of them in their key to production.
We started with, we were able to get a plant that had some very small versions of this equipment to buy into the process. They've already converted several of the units with the inverters style setup, and they're so thrilled they're going to finish every one they have, probably next year. They've got another phase rolling out this year. I think the final phase will roll out next year. They've been able to find some really cool things that we had never thought about, like the noise level goes down makes it easier for the operator to the point where they don't actually have to wear earplugs to comply with OSHA, it becomes an option.
Again, one of those other side benefits of an energy project we hadn't even thought about. The inverter, I think, is going to be our big push this year. What we'd to do is to see our plant loads be a lot more stable. We have an opportunity to significantly reduce K-bar and Power Factor penalty issues that those utilities where it applies. That would be our big push this year for us in 2022, Greg, to answer your question.
[00:26:55] MH: Have you been able to work with, I know some states offers some rebates and different things for variable speeds and different things. Have you been in the opportunity to work with any of them?
[00:27:03] SB: Oh, yes. One of the inherent things we get is the first free money out there, we're obligated to go get it.
[00:27:09] GS: Absolutely.
[00:27:10] SB: All right, the internal expectation for us performance wise, is we best be going trying to find that money. We've actually become really, really good at looking at federal laws. I have one of the websites, I always keep up is congress.gov, because I'm constantly looking for what's in new legislation, what's recently passed. Because you can’t understand is the internal clock for government, whether it be a tax credit, or an investment tax credit with the language. They love to do a lot of, in one bill, it'll be you have to break ground and by a certain date. In prior legislation, it was it had to be operational by a certain date. You have to keep up with that stuff.
Then of course, the utilities change on a dramatic basis. We've been very fortunate to gain a lot or probably well north of a million in incentives from utilities over during my time with my [inaudible 00:28:06]. Because we look at those diligently, we follow the example of the utility or the facility that was buying into the inverters on that particular piece of equipment. That utility was able to pitch in about $4,000 in incentives for each piece of equipment that we converted, so that was really nice.
We often look at if we know upfront that some of that money is available, typically what we'll do is we'll take credit for at least a portion of it. If utility tells me you're going to give me $100 in incentives to do a project. Typically what we'll do in the financials, we might use $50, because what we found is that what they promise up front isn't always what you get, when you finish.
Again, we to under promise and over perform on all of our financial evaluations. We even follow that rule on the on the incentives. But you're correct, Greg, there's lots out there, there's some really good resources as well, there's the DSIRE Database that's out there that you can go and look up individual states and utilities. A lot of the utilities have some common vendors that they work with. Some of the utilities use a company called Ally, a large one that we've worked with three or four different utilities as a company called CLEAResults. We have a pretty good relationship with them. They've actually tried to come out and work with us to find some things, because we found some stuff they hadn't seen before. They're trying to see if they can gain that experience in an expanded into their platforms and their portfolios.
There's a lots out there, there's a lot of money to be had. Particularly utilities that are little short on generation. You get up into ERCOT Market is pretty good. PJM is pretty good. The whole Northeast US is really good on incentives. We get yelled at pretty bad if we missed something, so we try not to.
[00:30:02] MH: Scott, what are some of your biggest lessons learned in the roles that you've had? What were some of the takeaways you had from them?
[00:30:09] SB: Well, certainly trying to learn how to make that transition from engineer to manager, engineer to financial analysis. Then of course, the communication from trying to act as an engineer and then communicate that up into the executive level. They speak a very different language in engineering, typically. Those are places where of, if I could point out, okay, I had a big problem here, there. It's one of the, probably one of those three areas. Those are all areas that the transition is not necessarily very straightforward, it can be very difficult. Certainly, as you gain each experience there, you've tried to build on that and get a little bit better the next time.
Those would be, it's that gap between the engineering side and the business side, and then communicating that up through the chain. Fortunately with Mohawk, like I said, my boss is excellent at communicating up and managing up. I've been fortunate to learn a lot from him on that subject. He's probably forgotten more than I know, but I'm getting close.
[00:31:15] MH: That's great. Is there any common myths about your profession or the field, the energy efficiency side of the business that you can debunk or demystify?
[00:31:25] SB: Probably that it's all very much engineering, very much physics. We try to go back to the basics a lot. Certainly, if you talk about something along the lines of the affinity law, that's an energy guys favorite rule, right? It's just basic physics, nothing magical about. It's very slow that motor down, it uses a lot less power. It's good stuff. We also look at the theory behind how does heat move in fluids. You go back to the heat capacity of the mass of the gas, right? Unfortunately, air density changes dramatically from the summer to the winter, so does that impact what goes on in your thermal process? We found that, oh, yeah, does and what can we do about it.
I don't think there's anything magical about it. I think there's a lot of really basic engineering stuff in there. Again, it takes a lot to go out and find those resources and figure out the very best solution that works. Lots of stuff out there, so let's see anything to debunk.
Certainly, I wouldn't say that it's simple, particularly once you get past the low hanging fruit. As you get into the little bit more challenging things. There's lots of options for solutions, trying to identify the best one and what makes the most sense, from investment of company capital. Sometimes that's not simple, but it's not always capital. There's lots of savings opportunities out there for non-capital related issues.
Probably the biggest one that's that people miss is that production waste side, as we talked about once. Once you've utilized that energy, it's gone. Even if you completely recycle the product, it doesn't matter that energy is gone. That's something to look at is, if I can reduce my waste, do I reduce my energy? The answer is usually, yes.
[00:33:17] GS: Of all the initiatives or projects you've been involved in, which one's been the most impactful or moved the needle the most, and which one was your favorite?
[00:33:25] SB: Certainly, the most impactful one we did was a plant in Virginia where we had a, it was an older plant, they still had some blackout paint on some of their roof windows from World War Two, older plants. They had heated the steam plant during the colder months with steam. They had a really large steam plant that unfortunately was not very efficient, and it had a substantial amount of leaks. We were able to gain approval for an ended up being a substantial capital investment for the company, but we converted all the building heat to infrared.
That project, and again, it was a substantial investment, but the payback ended up being about less than two years. That's how big the savings were, natural gas consumption at that plant was projected to decrease about 75 percent roughly and we've actually exceeded that. As part of that we were able to save about 20 million gallons of water a year in avoided steam. It was funny, we did a project and our sustainability people were like, “Oh, that's pretty good.”
Could we have done solar there? That's a good question. We actually did an analysis on a comparable investment, if we put in solar and if we did what we did with the heat changeover. What we found was is that we reduced emissions by 10 times using the – and this is the project that we choose. We reduced thermal emissions by 10 times what we would have with solar. We saved 20 million gallons of water, which we would not have with solar. The payback for the thermal project, like I said was less than two years. The payback for the solar would have been probably between 10 and 15 years.
The question comes up is, what was the better investment of company capital? The feedback I'm getting from that plant, because they're going through their first winter with that new heating system and stuff, I've heard no news. That in our plant, no news is always good news.
[00:35:25] MH: A 100 percent. A 100 percent.
[00:35:27] SB: That certainly was the project that speaks to mind and memory stuff. Probably, my favorite one is this one that we're working on getting implemented now, where we found that the varying motor load was so dramatically different that it was causing us problems. The plant challenged us there. It's not much different than we would have from any production facility. they basically said, “You got to be able to do it under the existing control system, because we're not going back to the Europeans to let them know you're doing it.”
The second thing is, is you can't mess with production at all. Same products got to go through at the same speed, same everything. Okay, that's fair. We want to put inverters on there, but it's a real challenge. You can't use a vector style inverter. It tends to be too slow. Then, what control signal would you utilize for that? Well, we happen to find two manufacturers that have an inverter that has an extremely high sample rate. Basically, it just looks at the load on the inverter itself. These sample rates are in the thousands per second, of times per second. I mean, really, really rapid.
We've tested both of those on the system very successfully. We actually did find a control issue that nobody knew about is is the manufacturer had a thing in there. If the motor amperage dropped below a certain level, it would basically shut that motor down temporarily. Of course, with the VFD, we ended up – we hit that level. We've developed to work around on that. Now, we're going to hopefully move forward with the process to do that. It's a modest capital project with a payback, probably, somewhere between a year and a year and a half. That was pretty neat.
Again, like I said, we found that we have that application across all of our plants at different power levels, because of the size of the motors involved. It's neat to find a phenomenon that we found company-wide, essentially manufacturer wide. It didn't matter. We're working to try to correct all the existing equipment we have. It's certainly in our plans in going on our list. We're also going back to the manufacturer’s going, “Hey, what are you doing? Let me talk to your electrical engineer. Why are we taking AC induction motors and putting them under varying loads? That's just a poor design. What better options? Can you provide us?”
[00:37:46] GS: Scott, as you see the manufacturing facilities across the world starting to transition to manufacturing 4.0, and “smart factories,” how do you see that impacting your role at Mohawk?
[00:37:58] SB: The IoT and AI stuff is definitely real. It's something that you need to figure out how to factor it in. Actually, we found several applications, even just as long as two or three years ago. They ended up not necessarily panning out at those particular plants, but we continue to look at them. At that plant, we have a fairly substantial fleet of laser-guided vehicles. The plant happens to be out in the Southwest. The current vehicles all use reflective mirrors, which are mounted on the structural beams. In the Southwest, it gets warm occasionally in the summers. Some of those beams move a little bit. We have some misalignment of some of the mirrors and occasionally, the laser-guided vehicles lose track of where they're at.
Unfortunately, during the summer in the heat, this happened a lot more than we would prefer. We looked at doing a retrofit with LED lighting, and tying that in with an RFID, an IoT solution to provide a secondary location map for the OTVs, that would tie in with the main manufacturer’s software. They had it, their software was such that it would take both the primary and a secondary feed for location. The goal was to take where we were and get up to more of like a 100 percent, knowing where everything was. Because what will happen is if it's done where it is, it stalls out. After a small time delay, it has to return to home, so that it can pick up again on its instruction sets. That's a case where IoT would have been – Again, it was an energy project, but we would have gained substantially from a secondary benefit of the energy project.
Of course, with LED lighting, we’ll have had the energy savings, but we also – we get a lot of feedback from folks that it's a real – it's viewed as a super positive to the production employees. I don't know if it's because they think the company cares. I'm not sure. They all say they can see better. They really like it. Blah, blah, blah. We have a lot of those.
It's easy for us to do that, because designing with the LED stuff is so much easier and much more flexible than designing with conventional lighting. You can find an LED fixture that's very tolerant of whatever temperature profile you expect to be there. You can look for different IP ratings. It's not difficult to find an IP65 qualified fixture, so that it is completely resistant to all the dust that your process generates and cleanings and everything. Hopefully, I answered the question there. Greg, that was a really wide question you asked.
[00:40:35] GS: Very good. Scott, thank you so much for your time. If some of our listeners wanted to reach out to you and pick your brain about some ideas, would you be open to that?
[00:40:42] SB: Absolutely. Sure.
[00:40:43] GS: What's the best way for them to get in touch with you?
[00:40:45] SB: Probably my email would be the best way. That's scott_bargerstock@mohawkind.com. Again, scott_bargerstock@mohawkind.com.
[00:40:59] GS: That's very generous. Part of, well really, main initiative is for us to connect manufacturing leaders across the United States. We have seen the power of connecting some of our customers. They'll have very similar problems, very similar initiatives. We'll see them struggling with something and say, “You know what? You need to contact Doug across town. They just did this very similar project, or had the same issue they were able to overcome.”
We've seen the power of those connections, and we've even gotten feedback from some of our customers going, “That was transformational to our business.” We went from clueless of how to handle a certain project, to dealing with somebody that's already been there, done that, and we really appreciate it. That's why we created this podcast is to create that community.
[00:41:46] SB: Oh, absolutely. We would concur with that thought process, because we've had really good success. We've actually worked with one of the utilities. They had a technical application center that they had some really specific expertise in infrared technology that we were able to do a lot of testing. We actually tested along four different processes. To date, we've already implemented one of those four applications that we tested in, because we were able to use their expertise on the equipment, be able to actually test and prove to people that it works. Yeah. Having somebody to go to that's been there, done that, just priceless.
[00:42:25] GS: Agreed. Scott, once again, thank you for today.
[00:42:28] MH: It was a pleasure.
[00:42:29] SB: Appreciate it. Again, I very much appreciate the invitation. It's been a privilege to participate.
[00:42:35] GS: Thank you, Scott. Have a good day.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:42:38] MH: Well, folks. That's it for this week's episode. Be sure to visit our website www.theindustrialmovement.com to view today's show notes and get more golden nuggets of value that we have collected from manufacturing and industrial professionals in our archived episodes. On our website, you can also sign up for our newsletter and find links to join The Industrial Movement Community on Facebook.
The Industrial Movement Podcast is where we discuss the people, the process and the equipment that drives American manufacturing. I'm your host, Morty Hodge, wishing you great success.
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