By Jim Fitch
Machinery Lubrication Magazine
By now, organizations that have advanced reliability and maintenance programs understand the intrinsic value of lubricant cleanliness. Noria and many others have published extensively on this subject. The business case is rock solid: the cost of preventing oil from becoming dirty (exclusion and removal) is a small fraction of what machine repairs and downtime will cost down the road. The sad truth is that many asset owners are under the a false impression that their filters are doing a good job and their oils are clean enough.
Just as it is true that not all lubricants are alike, the same holds true for filters. Filter manufacturing is a very competitive and diverse industry from the standpoint of cost, quality and performance. Owners of large equipment fleets can spend well over $1 million per year on filters. Industrial plants with extensive asset lists can face a similar filtration spend. A single filter element used on a large circulating oil system can cost more than $1,000.
While there are commodity (economy grade) filters of all types to choose from, as with many products, the greater value and quality often come from selecting the premium option at the high end of the price range. Yet, most premium high-performance filters can look very similar to cheaper, lower cost filters at first glance. Published data on filter performance by their suppliers is often embellished or out-of-date. After all, a filter supplier would never publish anything other than stellar performance data, and this data is usually the product of their own laboratory.