Sanitary Pipe - Installation Cost Estimation

[D.Stroh]

Hello, I was wondering if there are is a program that can be used to produce cost estimates for installation sanitary tubing (ASTM A270) or ASME BPE tubing?

Or are there rules of thumb that can be used?

Also, I've heard 100-300 dollar per linear foot of installed tubing depending on size and installation area. Does anyone have any better guides of how to do this? Getting the material cost would be fairly straight forward by getting my total feet of tube and fittings quoted by pipe supplier but I'm not sure how to estimate the labor to install this.

Thanks!

 

[EdStainless]

There is general labor, the welding (and all of the ID purge gas), the cost of fittings, hangers, and of course the inspection of every weld ID, and the cleaning and commissioning of the system.
I believe that there have been technical papers written about this in some of the Hygienic/Pharma conferences.
The ID finish will have a big impact on the cost. The care required to install a system of 10microinch EP tube will be a lot higher than for simple mechanically polished tube.
The $100-200/ft number does not not sound unreasonable, but I have no support for it.

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P.E. Metallurgy

 

[XL83NL]

Ed has made some valid points. I can’t comment from experience to something exact in your range, but just my 2 cents.
As to the labour, weve done a lot of orbital TIG (or GTAW for the Americans) welding for tubing systems mostly to A269, but also for pharmaceutical applications (however none 100% compliant to BPE nor A270). I believe we had just over 1 hour per weld, but I’d have to check to be totally sure. A lot of our tubing runs were prefab with little field welds.
The constraints we put to our systems were similar to the ones you have, although NDE (visual) and inspection would be more for BPE applications I think. Then there’s QAQC component. We have a simple system allowing traceability of the welder up to the WPS, as well as heatnrs. That’s all included in that 1 hour/weld. However your demands will probably result in higher key figures.
Hope this helps.

 

[D.Stroh]

Thanks Ed and XL83NL.

I found an old spreadsheet from a former coworker that has some approximate weld times based on the size of pipe. They start at 1 hr/weld for 0.5-2in tube and increase up to 3 hours for a 4" tube. I may use this plus material cost and then compare that with the $100-200/foot and see if those numbers agree.

 

[XL83NL]

The 1 hr/weld key figure we found is for our typical range of tubing sizes on process piping, which ranges from 1/8” to 3/4”, occasionally 1”.

 

[EdStainless]

D.S.
Now that you mention it, I recall people telling me that working with anything up through 2" was pretty much the same in terms of time. I think that the 1hr number is a single man doing cutting, weld prep, positioning, and welding. That makes sense.
They also used to say that the 4" and 6" were another animal. They didn't like the bigger stuff because to took multi-man crews, handling and alignment were tricky, and the weld purges were more difficult.

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P.E. Metallurgy