Pro tip: Our shop switched from a basic fiberglass blanket to a ceramic fiber board for furnace door seals

We had constant heat loss and a warped door frame on our main melt furnace for months. After installing the 1-inch ceramic board, the seal held for over a year and our gas bill dropped by about 15%. Has anyone else found a better material for high-heat door gaskets?

3 comments

3 Comments

casey_barnes2mo ago

Honestly sounds like you guys just had a bad blanket install to begin with. Tbh a 15% drop on the gas bill seems like a lot for just a door seal, maybe something else changed too. Those ceramic boards are crazy expensive, I can't see it being worth it for most shops. Feels like a solution for a problem that wasn't that big.

grace4192mo ago

Wait, @casey_barnes might have a point about the cost. But I'm curious, how many times did you have to replace the old fiberglass blanket before switching? I mean, if you're buying and installing new gaskets every few months, maybe the board starts to look better. Did you track that downtime or labor cost too?

oliver_ward142mo ago

Oh man, that's exactly it. We were replacing the fiberglass gasket like every other month, it just got shredded. The downtime was the killer though, an hour each time with the kiln cooling down. Once you add up all those little shutdowns, the board paid for itself in like, a year and a half maybe?