The Importance of Equipment Maintenance

By Anna Lockhart.  

Making sure your welding and roofing equipment are in proper working order is crucial to getting a job done properly and in good timing. 

In a recent episode of the Roofing Road Trips podcast, Heidi J. Ellsworth sat down with Dave Nordentoft, product manager for Leister, to discuss the importance of equipment maintenance and the best tips to keep your welding equipment in top shape. 

Ensuring your welding equipment is in working order and regularly maintained is crucial to user safety and longevity of the equipment. Taking the time to check and clean your equipment also ensures that the work you do is of top quality and also improves efficiency!  

Dave recognized that it’s easy to put these maintenance practices off, “Take care of your tools and your equipment and the equipment will take care of you. I think a lot of people get into the routine of their daily grind. They're doing everything working hard, and sometimes it's hard to take the time to step back away and say, ‘What should I be doing to take care of my equipment?’” Dave continues, “And it's not just Leister heat welding equipment. It's really any tools and equipment that help you be productive and help your company make money.”  

But by putting off equipment maintenance, you put yourself at risk of harm or of producing a lesser quality job. Dave explained further, “I think roofing contracting company owners and superintendents should be encouraging their employees that are working with the tools on a regular basis to be paying attention to the tools and look at these things on a daily or weekly basis and saying, ‘Hey, again, they all saying see something, say something, right? So, if you see something has happened with a piece of equipment, just don't overlook it.’”  

Since contractors rely on these pieces of equipment to run properly to get a job done, there are a few practices that they can implement on a jobsite or with their crew that take only a moment to do and can make sure things are working right. One tip Dave suggested was checking airflow.  

“At the one end of the hot air hand tool is the air intake and so there's a location where the air is drawn in, it's brought in through a turbine and impellers and brought in and pushed through the tool through a heating element that heats the hot air and then brings it out the other end of the nozzle,” Dave explained. “So, how that air flows through there dictates to a certain degree how that tool is going to perform and things happen on job sites.” 

Dave suggested, “Job sites are dirty, so there's different things like dust and dirt, particulate matter that'll get drawn into these tools. So it's not a bad idea to stop and take a break and check the filters, the intake filters, and make sure that those are clean. You can take the gun, open it up and use a little bit of compressed air to sort of clean that out.” 

Listen to the podcast to learn more equipment maintenance tips and tricks!