Filling Machine Repair & Maintenance
Expert Engineering Support for Filling Machines, when you need it.
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Petlife International.
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Filling Machine Repair & Maintenance
If you run any type of filling equipment — whether you’re a fruit juice bottling factory or a yoghurt manufacturer — you’ll have filling machinery that fills your bottles or cartons, and how effective your production is depends a lot on how automated that kit is. That might be a large automated filler like a Krones, or something much smaller — a single-point, single-bottle manual machine like the Chromex.
We’ve worked on everything from the largest Krones machines, bottling multiple thousands of bottles an hour, down to a single Chromex machine for much smaller manufacturers. But the problems are largely the same. It comes down to maintenance.
There’s a lot of moving parts in a bottling line — pumps, seals, mechanical parts throughout. The more automated the machine, the more mechanical parts there are to wear. And all mechanical parts wear, all seals wear, depending on use, how you clean them, and the chemicals you use. All of it adds up to the efficiency, effectiveness, and longevity of your machinery.
Some of the common problems you’ll come across: seized heads on bottling lines, mechanical seal failures on pumps — these are a regular one — and various other seals depending on the size and manufacturer of the machine.
We’ve picked up a lot of this experience over the years — working at Coleman’s in the mid-2000s on mint sauce, apple sauce, and mustard bottling lines, later contracting for Britvic at their Norwich site (before it closed) on Fruit Shoot and Robinsons Barley, and other factories running sauce lines. Blowing lines too, if you’re blow-moulding your own bottles — we’ve worked on that side of it as well.
Spotting Trouble Early
Spotting trouble early on these machines comes down to your senses as much as anything else. Look for leaks. Listen to how the machine sounds — any clanking, any banging, anything that’s not quite right is an indication something needs more investigation. If it doesn’t feel right, sound right, or seem right, that’s your cue.
Hopefully you’re picking most of this up through your planned maintenance. But your maintenance schedule needs to be geared towards keeping the machine running optimally — and that means it has to be an evolving document, never set in stone.
So many factories set up a PM schedule and leave it fixed for years. It’s not efficient, because every filling line, every bottling line, every machine is a bespoke piece of kit. These aren’t like cars rolling off a production line, all built to the same spec in their thousands. Bottling and filling machines are more custom-made than that — manufacturers learn, they make improvements, they swap parts because something’s no longer available. No two machines are built quite the same, which I’ve seen first-hand project managing installs and commissions. Because of that, they all wear differently, they all operate slightly differently, and they need a maintenance approach that’s tailored to that specific machine — not a generic schedule bolted on and forgotten.
What you’ll typically notice when problems start: seals beginning to leak, a bottle sticking at one particular filling location (more likely on a multi-stage volumetric filler than a single manual machine), parts starting to break, anything coming loose that points to increased vibration somewhere in the line. Keep an eye on all of it.
We lean heavily on condition-based monitoring for catching this early — thermal imaging and ultrasound work particularly well on pump bearings and gearboxes. More on our approach to condition-based monitoring here.
Getting It Set Up Right in the First Place
Part of condition-based monitoring is making sure things are set up correctly from the start. With moving mechanical parts, there are tolerances — set-to-failure gauges and specific details the manufacturer will give you, and it’s worth setting up to them properly.
Pumps are a good example. Any bottling or filling line has plenty of them, and a pump that isn’t set up correctly creates vibration — which adds stress to the equipment and can damage the pump over time.
One of the ways we get as good a setup as possible is using a laser alignment tool on the pump train. It gives an accurate alignment between the gearbox, pump, motor, and couplings — everything square, level, and optimised to run as it should. Get that right and the motor needs less power to turn it, because it’s simply easier to turn. You’ll also get a lot longer out of your pumps, gearboxes, and mechanical seals as a result.
You can often spot when this isn’t right without needing any of that kit, too — how many seals you’re going through, how many couplings you’re getting through, the sound of it, whether it’s vibrating. Those are all tells.
What a Service Visit With Us Actually Looks Like
This depends on whether you’re a new customer or an existing one, and whether we set up your maintenance schedule in the first place.
If you already have a schedule, we’ll work through it with you, look at your breakdown history, and as we get to know your equipment and the problems you’re having, we help optimise your planned maintenance to keep the machine running at its best. We might learn certain parts need replacing — we’ll understand that as we go, talking to your operators and looking at your data. If you’re logging minor stops and breakdowns, that data is gold for spotting patterns and working out what actually needs fixing.
Ultimately, you shouldn’t be living with regular breakdowns. You should be looking to remove them completely. That’s deep in our DNA — I learned it at Coleman’s, under Unilever, who were heavily into Japanese TPM at the time and running one of the most efficient factories in Unilever’s UK foods group.
We can get involved at any stage — brand new machines, installs, commissioning a line and setting up the maintenance plan from scratch, or coming in on an existing setup and evolving it as we learn what works and what’s been missed.
We run our own CMMS, and every intervention and work order we do gets logged in it. That means full traceability for you — sign-off procedures, handover documents, a proper history building up of your assets, your filling and bottling lines, and anything else we’re looking at, packing machinery included. We build that picture even if you don’t have your own maintenance team — and a lot of our customers are smaller manufacturers who don’t have the large teams a bigger operation would.
For those customers especially, we set you up with a world-class system — one I built based on what I wanted to see as an engineer, from nearly 30 years of experience working to BRC and other compliance standards, but also just to get the best efficiency and optimisation from a business point of view.
I’ve always thought commercially about this, and I think that’s made me a better engineer — because I intuitively understand that downtime is bad for business. A machine needs to get up and running quickly, and then you need to be working on removing that breakdown from happening again. That’s actu
ally the subject of a book I’m currently writing, The Breakdown Free Factory — the best of nearly thirty years trying to get factories running as efficiently as they possibly can.
Get In Touch
If you’re fighting a filling or bottling line that won’t stay reliable, or your PM schedule hasn’t been touched since it was first written, give us a shout via the contact us page.
Want to see this in action? Read about how we restored filling line reliability on a Chromex SP1001
Our Latest Work
The improvement process and journey to world class is deeply routed in our history and is at the core of what we offer. Our preventive maintenance services and regular maintenance programs, designed to extend the life of your machines, improve efficiency, improve reliability, and save you money in the long run.
