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What are failed traps costing you?

Industry surveys routinely find that a quarter or more of mechanical steam traps in service have failed — most of them leaking live steam. Move the sliders to see what that means in tonnes of steam, dollars and CO₂ for your plant.

Your system

Defaults: a failed DN25 medium-pressure trap leaks about 76.9 kg/h (measured on a Chinese petrochemical site). 0.28 t CO₂ per tonne of steam is typical for a coal-fired package boiler — adjust to your fuel. USD values are indicative; we quote FOB/CIF per project.

Estimated annual loss
Failed traps in service
Steam wasted (tonnes / year)
Money lost (USD / year)
CO₂ emitted (tonnes / year)
SteamEco retrofit (all traps)
Indicative investment
Payback period

Real projects often do better than this estimate: replacing only the worst leaking traps typically cuts 20–70% of steam loss on those lines (a mega refining-chemical complex in East China measured 20–70% per replaced unit). The calculator assumes money is only saved on steam — it excludes fewer trap replacements, less maintenance downtime, and improved heat transfer.

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Where the numbers come from

Reference points from real Chinese plants

76.9

kg/h steam leaked by one failed DN25 medium-pressure trap (site measurement)

32.26%

steam saving after replacement, measured by third-party inspection at a Yangtze River Delta petrochemical complex

−21%

steam consumption per tonne of product at a polyurethane chemical plant after replacing an imported trap

3–12 mo

payback range achieved across documented SteamEco retrofit projects

Worked example from the field

A well-known Jiangsu chemical plant ran 328 mechanical traps; field testing found 156 of them leaking, together wasting 7,500 t of steam per year. Replacing them with SteamEco venturi traps saves about USD 290,000 per year at a steam price of USD 40/t — with a payback inside 12 months, and no further trap-replacement cycle every two years.