Natural gas compressors last a long time. Much of the current fleet deployed in the natural gas transmission system in the United States is more than 50 years old. Back then, lubrication technology required that there be a single pump for every delivery point on these compressors. This methodology was expensive, needed constant maintenance, and required a person to be on-site counting drops in a sight glass to ensure that each point was receiving the required amount of lubricant, creating a system that was far from fail-safe.

Sloan Lubrication Systems installed some of the first divider block lubrication systems on natural gas compressors. Divider blocks represented a leap forward in lubrication technology. By accurately dividing the flow from a single pump to multiple points and enabling accurate flow rate monitoring, divider blocks were a critical step in creating the first fail-safe lubrication system.

While the best solution at the time, converting natural gas compressors to divider blocks was time consuming and not cost efficient, and didn’t address the most common system failures – introduction of contaminants through old oil supply systems, archaic instrumentation and monitoring systems. Sloan Lubrication Systems experienced these shortcomings first-hand and set out to design and develop a better way.

We wanted to create a self-contained, modular system that could be adapted to a vast majority of applications. The system needed to be truly fail-safe, eliminate the risk of contamination from old supply systems, and be completely turnkey, so that it wouldn’t need to be adapted to unique equipment.

The Watchman was born.

We designed the Watchman for gas compressors, but quickly learned that many other industries were dealing with similar challenges. The Watchman became a go-to choice for Natural Gas Midstream, Natural Gas Transmission, Refining and Chemical, Cement and Aggregates, Refrigeration and Food Processing, and Critical Machinery.

Today, Sloan Lubrication Systems has thousands of Watchman systems in service, and we continue to update the platform with the latest and greatest technology.