Tank and Vessel Insulation in Arlington, TX and the DFW Metroplex

Hot-water and thermal storage tanks, process and mix tanks, reactors, heat exchanger shells, indirect-fired vessels — anything with a shell, heads and a temperature. Vertical or horizontal, skirt-mounted or on saddles, indoors or out in the yard.

The whole vessel gets covered, not just the easy cylinder. Heads are insulated with cut segments fitted to the curve. Nozzles, instruments and manways get sewn removable covers so maintenance opens a buckle instead of cutting the jacket. A tank with a bare top head and naked manways gives back a real share of what the sidewall insulation just saved.

Cold and chilled vessels are their own discipline — there the enemy is condensation, not fuel, and the system is built around an unbroken vapor barrier. That work lives on the cold and chilled insulation page.

A tank loses heat off every square foot of shell, head and roof, all day, every day it holds temperature. That 8-by-12 tank at 180°F has roughly 350 square feet of hot steel shedding about 73,000 Btu per hour into the room — heat your boiler or heater paid for and your building has to get rid of.

Two inches of insulation cuts the loss by better than ninety percent. Running 24/7 that is about $6,000 a year back in fuel, against a job in the $6,500–11,400 range — payback in about a year and a half, and faster on hotter vessels. A process tank at 250 or 300°F closes the math sooner than the hot-water example does.

Our calculator runs this same math on your tank diameter, height, temperature and schedule, and hands us the whole spec with a project code when you are ready.

Flat and gently curved surfaces take rigid board — mineral wool or fiberglass — sprung to the shell and held with bands on speed clips, joints staggered so there is no straight path from steel to air. Tighter radii take flexible batt. Thickness follows the same rule as pipe: 1.5 inches to about 200°F, 2 inches to 350°F, 3 inches to 600°F.

Heads are the part that separates a clean job from a bad one. We cut the segments on our own benches — gores fitted to the curve, not squares mashed flat — so the head carries the same thickness as the sidewall instead of a thin spot right where the tank is hottest.

Manways, nozzles, level instruments and relief valves stay reachable. Each one gets a fitted removable cover that comes off in a minute and goes back on the same way, so the first maintenance call does not end with a knife through your insulation.

Outdoor tanks live or die by the jacket. Standard is embossed aluminum, banded, with every lap facing down-weather and sealed — water that gets past a jacket soaks the insulation, kills the R-value, and sits against the steel corroding the shell under the jacket where nobody sees it. Keeping that water out is most of what the metal jacketing trade is.

Stainless goes where chemicals or washdown demand it; indoors, aluminum or PVC does the job for less. We roll and cut the jacket on our own benches — CJM started as a metal shop, and it shows on a tank, where the jacket is the part everyone sees.

Tank insulation is cold work — no welding, no torch, no hot-work permit for most jobs. The tank stays in service while we band the board on. You do not drain down or cool off for us.

Where a vessel does need to come offline — scaffold over an agitator, work around a live relief path — we plan it into your maintenance window and fabricate everything ahead of it, so wrench time inside the window is hours, not days.

Every job starts with a free walk-down and an IR gun, and ends with before-and-after surface temperatures on paper — the sheet that shows whoever signs the gas bill exactly what changed.