What does an hour of furnace downtime cost? The figure that decides the strategy

What does an hour of unplanned furnace downtime cost? That figure decides the right maintenance strategy — and very few operators have it to hand.

Three items for any honest calculation

• Lost production: tonnage times contribution margin — with melting units, quickly a five-figure sum per hour.
• Reheating: a furnace that has been allowed to go cold needs a controlled heat-up curve with holding stages. That often costs days, not hours — and belongs in full in the outage calculation.
• Consequential damage: continuing to run with a worn lining risks breakthroughs and a major incident instead of a plannable repair.

Our experience from 500+ projects: around 80 % of refractory emergencies announce themselves. With thermography during operation we detect a thin residual lining early and translate the finding into a targeted partial repair in the next planned shutdown window — a fraction of the cost of an unplanned failure.