Stop losing sleep over pump downtime, seal leaks, and maintenance headaches with these proven pump longevity strategies.
The pressure is real—and it's not just in your pipes.
Picture this: It's 2 AM, and your phone rings. Another pump leak. Another line shutdown. Another night of scrambling to keep production on track while costs spiral and your team burns out. Sound familiar?
You're not alone. Across processing plants worldwide, engineering and operations managers face the same relentless triple threat: push more product through the line, slash operating costs, and achieve zero unplanned downtime. It's a tall order when your pumps—the literal heartbeat of your operation—are fighting a losing battle against wear and outdated technology.
But here's the good news: pump performance problems aren't inevitable. At Unibloc® Hygienic Technologies (UHT), we've spent nearly 40 years helping thousands of plants transform their pumping operations. Our promise is simple but powerful: Proven Hygienic Pump Performance—for those who demand more.
Eric Soderstrom, Business Development Manager at UHT, has spent 17+ years solving real-world pump problems-- from honey pumps losing $100,000 annually to poultry lines with blown-out pressure gauges. In a recent webinar, Eric shared the hard-won wisdom he and UHT's engineering team have gathered from real-world applications.
What you'll learn.
This blog post reveals practical, proven strategies in order to:
- Help you spot performance problems before they cause expensive downtime.
- Show you why your sanitation process might be your pump's worst enemy—and how to fix it.
- Explain the counterintuitive truth about pump sizing that could double your pump longevity.
- Reveal the piping mistakes costing you thousands of dollars in pressure losses and premature wear.
- Share real case studies where simple changes saved over $100,000 annually.
Ready to stop fighting fires and start preventing them? Let's dive in.
Red flags your pump performance is starting to fail
The signs start small. Pumps that used to hit 50 GPM now struggle to reach 40. Pressure gauges show numbers that don't quite add up. The seal previously lasting six months now needs replacing every few weeks. Maybe you've chalked it up to normal wear and tear or told yourself you'll deal with it at the next scheduled downtime.
But Eric has seen where this road leads. "The most expensive pump problems are the ones you ignore," he explains. Watch for these warning signs:
- Flow rates dropping even when nothing else has changed.
- Frequent re-machining of your pump’s housing to restore performance.
- Seal leaks graduating from occasional nuisance to regular crisis.
- Unusual noise or vibration.
- Performance tanking when switching between products of different viscosities.
The golden rule of pump performance longevity.
These symptoms point to deeper issues—but there's a unifying principle that can transform how you think about pump reliability:
Eric's Golden Rule: To maximize pump performance, minimize pump damage.
Here's a truth bomb to surprise even experienced plant managers: your pump doesn't fail during production. It fails during cleaning.
"Pumping product is actually pretty easy," Eric reveals. "Surviving nightly sanitation? That's the real challenge."
Think about what happens on third shift. Your sanitation crew is under tremendous pressure—they have a short window to tear down equipment, clean everything thoroughly, and reassemble it perfectly. They're working fast, often dealing with high turnover, sometimes with tools not quite right for the job.
Eric has witnessed the reality firsthand: "I've seen crews using hammers to knock pumps apart. Channel locks gripping delicate rotor shafts. Components thrown into buckets where they bang against each other." Every ding, every dent, every misaligned part becomes tomorrow's performance problem.
The solution isn't just better training (although it certainly helps)—it's better design. UHT's QuickStrip® technology eliminates the need for tools entirely. One-way reassembly means even a brand-new crew member can't put it back wrong. The patented Safety Swing Arm prevents nicks from dropped covers.
The result? Your sanitation team's job gets easier, faster, and less stressful. And your pump actually makes it to the morning shift intact and ready to perform.
The bigger-is-better secret to pump longevity.
After sanitation, the main reason for declining pump performance is wear. Asking a hygienic pump to work too hard is asking for problems. Here's Eric’s tip to possible save thousands of dollars: Size up and slow down.
Let’s say your flow rate needs to be 10 GPM. You can run a small lobe pump at 600 RPM, which is fine for water-like products. If your product is a thick cream, then a small pump will wear out fast and require frequent seal changes.
Instead, choose a mid-sized pump and run it at 300 RPM. You’ll still get a 10 GPM flow rate, but with less wear on the pump.
Highly viscous products like ground chicken can be hard on a pump. In that case, select a large pump and run it at 20 RPM. You’ll get the needed flow rate, and the pump will last for years.
Yes, the bigger pump costs more upfront. But here's what makes your job easier: fewer emergency calls at night, longer intervals between maintenance shutdowns, predictable budgets instead of surprise expenses, and actually making it through production runs without drama. The $2,000 you "saved" by buying smaller? You'll spend it on the first premature seal replacement—and keep spending it.
The milkshake principle of pump feeding.
Golden Rule #2: The pump must receive the product before it can pump it.
Eric's favorite teaching tool is deliciously simple: "Imagine a thick milkshake. The restaurant gives you a nice, short, fat straw. You can enjoy every sip. Now imagine they gave you a coffee stirrer instead. You'd pull and pull, get nothing but frustration, and probably end up with a headache."
Your pump feels the same way about skinny, twisty inlet piping.
Eric shares a perfect example: "We got a call from a food plant—managers were experiencing seal leaks and terrible flow from their 6-inch pump. When we arrived, we found they were feeding it through a 4-inch line. It's like asking an Olympic swimmer to breathe through a cocktail straw." The fix was almost embarrassingly simple: upsize the infeed to 6 inches. Both problems vanished overnight. Total cost? A few hundred dollars. Total savings? Thousands in seal replacements and lost production time.
But discharge piping is also important. At a poultry plant, Eric noticed something alarming: "Every single pressure gauge was pegged at maximum. Just blown out." The pumps were moving partially frozen chicken mixture through 6-inch pumps—but someone had reduced the discharge piping to 4 inches over 25 feet.
This created high pressure for the pump to overcome. Not only was the line not hitting its target flow rate; it was also shortening the life of the pump.
In one syrup-pumping application, a 2-inch discharge piping created 177 PSI that the pump had to work against. Operators upsized the discharge piping to 3-inch, and the pressure dropped to just 32 PSI. "That's the difference between a pump lasting 10 months versus 10 years," Eric emphasizes.
When you make the piping right, your job becomes exponentially easier: no more mysterious seal failures, no more pump performance that "just doesn't work like they used to," and no more emergency shutdowns to ruin your weekend.
When $100,000 a year disappears through your pump seals.
Seal failure is every operations manager's nightmare—the most visible, most disruptive, and most expensive symptom of pump problems. When a seal fails, the line stops. Product gets contaminated or lost. Workers stand idle waiting. And your phone rings.
But the cost stories are what really drive the lesson home.
A food manufacturer called UHT about their legacy pump. "They were replacing seals every single week," Eric recalls. "At $2,000 per changeout, plus all the lost product, we're talking over $100,000 annually." The problem? They were using the wrong seal type for honey's demanding characteristics. "We switched them to the proper seals. Problem solved. They now have $100,000 back in their budget—every year."
A tank transport company was plagued by cheap O-ring seals that leaked every two weeks—$3,000 per incident in downtime and labor. UHT experts recommended proper seals that lasted 14 times longer. The kicker? This company operates 500 pumps. "Do the math," Eric says with a smile. "It's massive savings, and suddenly maintenance isn't playing constant catch-up anymore."
Keep foreign objects out of your pump.
Foreign material is like a silent assassin lurking in your process. At one plant, metal pieces from conveyor belt wire were sneaking into pumps, shredding seals, and jamming rotors. The solution was remarkably simple. An upstream strainer solved the problem. "A strainer pays for itself the first time it catches debris," Eric notes. Your job gets dramatically easier when you're preventing pump performance problems instead of constantly reacting to them.
Of course, not all products are compatible with a strainer, but if your product can be strained, it’s an ideal way to preserve pump performance.
Select hygienic pumps that are designed to avoid damage and maintain tolerances.
Most pumps in service today are based on 20-year-old designs. Legacy pumps are often the root cause of a constant maintenance treadmill that makes your job exhausting.
Their complex construction works well for Clean-in-Place, but it gives too many opportunities for cleaning crews to damage parts with tools or improper reassembly.
Their long shafts can bend under pressure and scratch the housing. In fact, many managers with legacy pumps have come to expect frequent re-machining as normal. Not only is re-machining expensive, it also creates custom parts that can't be swapped between pumps. Workers sometimes switch rotors between re-machined pumps with costly consequences.
Perhaps the biggest flaw of legacy pumps is the rotor bolt, which workers can easily mis-torque. Over-tightening can crush the sleeve, pushing the rotor out of alignment and into contact with the housing. Under-tightening allows the bolt to back out, causing catastrophic damage.
Fortunately, pumps based on modern, innovative designs—like UHT's QuickStrip® design—minimize the risk of pump damage. We call them FoodFirst® and CleanPlus™ pumps because they’re engineered to meet the rigorous demands of hygienic processing across food and industrial applications.
Short, stout shafts resist flexing. They eliminate rotor bolts and their associated risk of pump damage. Instead, rotors are secured at the end by patented FlushCaps that hold the rotor in alignment while still allowing CIP. By maintaining tolerances, the pumps maintain their discharge pressures and flow rates.
Optional front-loading seals mean your maintenance team can swap them in minutes without disturbing the entire pump assembly. In fact, our pumps can be manually cleaned in 20 minutes versus 2 hours for a legacy pump.
Your roadmap to pump performance that actually lasts.
Here's your practical checklist:
- Monitor actively—track flow rates, pressures, and seal life to catch problems while they're still cheap to fix.
- Audit your sanitation process—are you setting up crews for success or forcing them to damage equipment?
- Rethink your next pump purchase—spec for the middle of the pump’s performance range.
- Review every seal in your pumps—switching to the right type of seal can dramatically lower maintenance needs.
- Walk your piping with fresh eyes—where are you choking inlets or creating discharge pressure barriers?
- Calculate what downtime actually costs—suddenly, the ROI on better equipment becomes crystal clear.
- Talk to someone who has solved pump performance problems before—UHT's pump performance engineers have seen it all.
Visit https://unibloctech.com/contact/ to connect with Eric's team for a free pump evaluation. Our engineers will assess your current system, uncover any hidden problems, and show exactly where you may be losing performance and money.
