Published on 13/08/2019
Your vessels always need to have a supply of the correct grade of calibration gas to make sure their gas detectors are operating safely. The costs associated with maintaining this supply can put great pressure on already stretched budgets as well as causing significant headaches for operators.
This can become even more costly and complicated if you receive very short notice that one of your vessels is running short on calibration gas and you’re forced to use a local supplier. As well as interrupting the smooth running of your operations, there are a number of other reasons why this is bad for business.
The availability of quality service providers is always a challenge and when the situation demands an urgent response from a local supplier, you don’t have much leverage or bargaining power.
The standard of the gas or canisters may be poor, their service may be inadequate or unreliable, they may be hugely over-priced – but you’ll still have to use them.
Calibration gases can be unstable – especially reactive or ‘sticky’ gases. Because they’re so chemically active they can even react with the containers that are used to store them.
This is why gases have a limited shelf life and an expiry date that’s clearly labelled on the outside. Expired calibration gas won’t provide accurate readings and will be potentially dangerous so it needs to be replaced, regardless of how much is left in the container.
Local suppliers will often be given very short notice when supplying ships that are approaching port. That means that they need to have a constant stock – stock that’s usually bought in bulk. The cylinders they provide may have been sitting around for a while with their expiry dates getting closer and closer so you may end up paying over the odds for gas that will soon go out of date.
Different providers all need to meet the same standards but the price and the level of service will vary from port to port. You’ll need to pay all the associated costs that come with multiple re-stocking deliveries too – freight costs, dangerous goods charges, custom’s and agent’s fees – they all add up.
In addition to this, the relatively poor standard of cylinders in the industry means that calibration gases you buy from local suppliers will probably need to be replaced more regularly.
There’s also the time spent on administration, a hidden cost that’s frequently overlooked.
The Chief Officer is responsible for identifying, calibrating, and adjusting all gas measuring instruments onboard and they must make sure that an adequate amount of the correct grade of calibration gas is readily available.
Each detector will have a different schedule and, even with plenty of advance planning, you can spend hours organising the supply of calibration gas for every unit on the fleet. Keeping track of expiry dates, maintenance schedules and calibration tests becomes significantly more complicated when you need to re-supply at short notice.
Add up the time spent on your calibration gas supply week by week, month by month, year by year and then compare it with the annual salary of a chief officer or purchaser. You’ll see how expensive this time can be, especially when they could be concentrating on more valuable areas of your business.
Using FastCalGas 1-2-1 will make sure that you never have to face any of these issues. You’ll never run out of calibration gas and you’ll cut down on carriage and agents’ charges as well as the hidden costs that come from the time spent on administration. It simplifies your calibration gas requirements into one order, two years’ supply and one delivery.
We review your usage of calibration gas to determine your requirements and run on-going checks with vessels, contacting each ship to arrange re-stocking. Just pass on the inventory of gas detectors on board your fleet or let us contact the ships directly to get the information and we take care of the rest. Our lean order processing and extensive global supply chain means that we have a four hour turnaround on quotes and 98% of our orders are shipped within 24 hours.
In terms of quality, FastCalGas is the world first in offering a 27-month manufactured shelf life on all reactive mixtures. It has the highest production standards of any calibration gas on the market and uses advanced materials with a mass spectrometer to analyse and verify the quality of every cylinder – in 30,000 deliveries, only two defects have ever been reported, a quality yield of over 99.993%.
Streamline your operations with consistent, high quality calibration gas shipped anywhere in the world. Contact us to find out more about FastCalGas 1-2-1.