Tank / vessel

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 take cut segments fitted to the curve, and nozzles, instruments and manways get sewn removable covers so maintenance opens a buckle instead of cutting the jacket. Cold and chilled vessels are their own discipline, 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, every day it holds temperature. An 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 paid for and your building has to get rid of.

Two inches of insulation cuts that 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 sooner on a hotter vessel. Our calculator runs the same math on your tank diameter, height, temperature and schedule.

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, so we cut the segments on our own benches — gores fitted to the curve, not squares mashed flat — and the head carries the same thickness as the sidewall. Manways, nozzles, level instruments and relief valves each get a fitted removable cover, 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 kills the R-value and sits against the steel, corroding the shell 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 — so the tank stays in service while we band the board on. Where a vessel does need to come offline, 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.

Cost and energy figures on this page are planning examples, not measured results from a CJM project. Material, thickness and installation selections depend on the actual conditions and site requirements.