Let Ice Pigging Save You Money
Cleaning a pipe costs more than the cleaning itself. The total cost includes lost production, wasted product, where applicable, water and effluent, labour costs etc. as well as the risk of the conventional technique not solving the problem.
Ice pigging is a technique where a slurry of fine ice crystals is pumped through a pipeline to scour it clean, and it tends to reduce several of these costs at once. Ice Pigging de-risks process challenges because it is a quick, low risk, solution with minimal system invasiveness.
Downtime is usually the biggest cost
For Industrial applications, production or process downtime often costs far more than the cleaning and remediation work. Traditional methods can mean stripping pipework or waiting for chemical soaks and cycles (often involving hazardous chemicals) to finish.
Ice pigging uses existing connections and typically completes in a single pass, so the outage is shorter and easier to fit into a scheduled changeover or quiet period.
Shorter outages mean more production hours and fewer missed orders.
Lower water, chemical and disposal costs
Flushing and chemical cleaning use large volumes of water and often several rinse stages. Ice Pigging generally needs less water and, because the ice melts in the line, there is no pig to clean and no separate residue to rinse out. That means smaller volumes to treat, test and dispose of, which reduces effluent charges and treatment costs. For utilities, less water flushed also means less treated water wasted.
Fewer repeat cleans and fewer failures
A solid pig can jam in bends, valves and diameter changes, and recovering a stuck pig is expensive. Ice slurry flows through restrictions, and it melts if it does stall, so the risk of a costly blockage is much lower.
Cleaning the whole line in one pass also means fewer return visits. The returned slurry can be sampled, which shows what was in the pipe and helps plan the next clean rather than repeating one that wasn't needed.
Longer-term savings
Regular cleaning keeps lines closer to their design condition. In water networks, removing deposits can improve flow and water quality and cut customer complaints. In heating and cooling systems, cleaner pipes and heat exchangers transfer heat more efficiently, which reduces energy use. In food plants, less build-up lowers the risk of contamination events and product recalls, which can cost far more than any cleaning programme.