The industrial segment of our industry continues to shrink as more and more heavy industries close or move away from their reliance on coal and steam power.
In addition to the loss of the Caltex and Shell refineries in Sydney and the Gove alumina refinery in the NT, we now face the real prospect of the Port Kembla steelworks closing its remaining blast furnaces.
In South Australia they are about to close, or mothball, their remaining two coal fired power stations and will now rely on wind & solar for their power generation.
Demise of mineral fibre insulation in favour of PE insulation
The drift towards the use of polyethylene insulation at the expense of fibreglass continues unabated with PE being specified for both hot & chilled water systems on a number of major projects. We of course continue to hold an extensive range of both products to ensure that we can supply whichever product is specified.
Rockwool -v- Fibreglass spi
n the last newsletter I commented on the trend to specify rockwool, also known as mineral wool, for application onto hot water piping systems. I have a bit more information on this now. It appears that one of our competitors has decided that rather than stocking both fibreglass and rockwool pipe sections they will now stock only rockwool pipe sections.
It seems that this company has been promoting that they can supply rockwool pipe sections cheaper than they can supply fibreglass sections. If this is their position we would simply state that we supply fibreglass sections considerably cheaper than they supply rockwool sections.
If you have a consultant specifying rockwool in lieu of fibreglass on low temp steam or hot water piping systems on the basis “that it is cheaper”, politely tell them “they’ve been conned”
Until next time,
Mike Flavell