RICHARDTON -- For the Red Trail Energy LLC ethanol plant here, spring isn't the only time for cleaning. This week the plant is shut down for routine fall maintenance, or what is called a fall outage.
The plant officially stopped production Monday and is slated to begin again Friday. The cleaning and maintenance is done twice a year. The spring outage was done last May.
"Any time we have scheduled maintenance, we like to shut it down, and later in the fall when it's cooler, it's less stress on the people working during the shut down," President/CEO Mick Miller said. "It also prepares us for being able to run the plant for up to another six months, through the winter and not have shut downs during winter months."
The turn around time is about four to five days for the outage, he added.
"It's any maintenance to take place on equipment, any rebuilds and cleaning," Miller said. "It's mainly preventative maintenance type things like changing oil, inspecting all equipment, emptying out all the tanks, inspecting all things internally and cleaning things properly."
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Also at this time, laws require the plant to do a boiler inspection, he added.
"We take our entire boiler down and do a thorough inspection on it with state assistance," Miller said. "We can do this scheduled and planned while we have the people, materials and parts on hand, instead of waiting for something to break. We want to go down and check things out before we have mechanical breakdowns on most of our equipment."
The plant has about 40-50 contractors on hand to work during this time, he added.
The plant's construction phase is completed, but it is still under warranty.
"There are some warranty items that are being looked at and warranty things taking place, but for the most part, this is a Red Trail Energy scheduled fall shut down to get our plant ready to run consistent and strong," Miller said.
Equipment for a second truck lane in the grain receiving area of the plant to allow trucks with dried distiller's grain and corn to load and unload at the same time also has been installed.
"That was basically done last week," Miller said. "It was done to increase truck traffic efficiency on site."
