Installation and Service

Before the Unit Arrives

Confirm the bundle pull clearance. You need clear space in line with the shell at least equal to the bundle length, plus handling room, and it has to stay clear of pipe racks, cable trays and adjacent equipment. On vertical units the equivalent is overhead lift height and a route.

Check the support arrangement. One saddle fixed and one slotted, with the slots sized for calculated thermal growth. Fixing both transmits shell growth into the nozzles and the connected piping.

Commissioning

Vent the shell and the tube side before startup, from the true high point in the installed orientation. On steam duty, drain the exchanger and warm through slowly rather than admitting steam into a cold flooded unit, which produces damaging shock loading.

On bolted joints using PTFE or filled PTFE gaskets, plan a retorque after the first heat-up. That is normal practice for those materials rather than a sign of a problem.

In Service

Track performance rather than cleaning on a calendar. Approach temperature or overall coefficient trended over time tells you when a unit genuinely needs attention, and usually reduces cleaning frequency while improving availability.

When performance falls on a condenser or a steam heater, check drainage and venting before assuming fouling. Flooding and gas blanketing both look exactly like a fouled exchanger and are far more common.

Service

Renew gaskets and o-rings whenever a joint is opened. Reused sealing components are the most common cause of a leak after a serviced exchanger is put back together. Follow the specified crossing torque pattern in stages rather than tightening around the circle in one pass.

Track plugged tube count. Every plug removes surface area and distorts flow distribution, and once plugging reaches the low single-digit percentages of tube count it is worth costing a replacement bundle.