Ask any maintenance team that has dealt with conventional pipe lagging — fiberglass, calcium silicate, foam glass — and you’ll hear the same complaints. It’s wet. It falls apart. Every time you need access to a valve or flange, you’re cutting it away and starting over. The insulation budget ends up being a recurring expense rather than a one-time installation.
Removable insulation covers offer a fundamentally different approach — and for valves, flanges, expansion joints, and other components that require periodic access, they make more operational and economic sense than any conventional alternative.
The Real Cost of Conventional Valve Insulation
Valves require annual maintenance, and annual maintenance requires removing traditional lagging. Besides the obvious cost of labor and disposal, other hidden costs inflate maintenance projects and increase project duration.
What you are risking with traditional lagging:
- Labor cost to remove and dispose of the old insulation
- Material cost to install new insulation after access
- Downtime to complete the work and preform reinstallation.
- Coverage gaps, moisture infiltration, and inadequate vapor barriers.
Across a large facility with hundreds of insulated valves and flanges, this adds up to a significant and largely avoidable maintenance burden.
How do ISOCOVERS Work?
UniTherm’s ISOCOVERS, a line of removable insulation jackets designed specifically for valves, flanges, strainers, steam traps, expansion joints, and other piping components solve the need for thermal insulation with the practical reality of meeting access requirements.
Covers come in standard sizes or custom fitted to your application. Closures use heavy-duty fastening systems — typically lacing wire or hook-and-loop — that allow removal and reinstallation in minutes without tools. Unlike lagging, ISOCOVERS maintain their shape even after repeated maintainence cycles, eliminating the need for replacement materials.
UniTherm selects it’s materials for your temperature range and environment: high-temperature wool or ceramic fiber for steam and high-temperature process applications, fiberglass or mineral wool for standard service, and specialized materials for cryogenic or corrosive environments.
Energy Performance: What to Expect
A bare valve in a steam system is a meaningful energy loss point. The surface area of a flanged valve can be many times that of the adjacent pipe. Not to mention, valves and fittings are often completely uninsulated precisely because of the access concern. ISOCOVERS eliminate that tradeoff.
Energy studies on steam systems with significant uninsulated valvework consistently show annual savings that justify cover costs many times over. For high-pressure steam system, retaining BTUs is crucial. BTUs lost to radial heat add up to massive costs across a system with dozens of uninsulated components.
When to Specify Removable Covers
- Any valve, flange, or fitting that requires periodic access — which is essentially all of them
- Steam systems with significant uninsulated valvework
- High-temperature process piping where personnel protection from surface temperatures is a concern
- Systems in environmentally sensitive locations where failed lagging creates housekeeping problems
- New construction where avoiding the conventional lagging cycle from the start is the most cost-effective approach