If you are in the online retail business, you know about the horrors of storage warehouses and how the shipping companies handle the boxes roughly. You may not know the Air Pillow Packaging machine. Amazon warehouse workers handle shipment boxes with about as much gentleness as the Amazon work policies treat them. The picture is relatively similar across all the major delivery companies.

For that, just using bubble wrap and packaging paper isn’t enough protection for fragile goods. You need more heavy-duty products like air pillows. Air pillows offer a more voluminous cushioning effect against outside impact, and you can use them to fill out the empty spaces in large boxes.

But buying air pillows at a retail price can quickly eat into the profit margin of the product you’re trying to sell due to how expensive they are. Owning an air pillow machine and making the air pillows yourself is far cheaper. This article will be about what you need to look for when buying one.

How Air Pillow Packaging Machines Work

Air pillow packaging machines create air-filled box fillers that go in shipment boxes. Usually, such devices can pump out roughly 5-20 pillows every minute. The process is entirely automatic if you use a good-quality air pillow machine.

Such machines are easy to operate; as long as you complete the manual part of the process, the device can do the rest by itself. The manual part of the process is to attach the film roll to the machine. The attaching system can vary based on manufacturer and model type but is fundamentally similar.

After you attach the film roll to the machine, you’ll need to select how many paper pillows you want to inflate and how fast you want them. You can choose that through the dashboard control hub on the machine. High-end air cushion packaging machines have LED displays. Tow-end ones only have the bare minimum necessary buttons.

Once you do all that, the machine will run and inflate individual air pillows and push them out. Good-quality film rolls will have perforated connectors. Those will help make separating the air pillows easier.

Types of Air Pillow Packaging Machines

You can’t separate air pillow packaging machines into different categories because there are too many of them. It’s not a standardized product, so many manufacturers produce their own versions of the device, and it’s hard to use their parameters to classify them accurately. But all of them get the job done, and that’s what matters.

There are large, industrial-grade ones, about a waist high. These heavy-duty machines can supply enough air pillows to provide for an entire factory and packaging line. Large devices, such as those, consume more power than their smaller counterparts.

There are medium ones, about as large as a micro ATX mid-tower CPU case. You can place them on your desk and operate from there. Such machines usually have the film rolls placed horizontally on the side. Some air pillow packaging machines also have a vertical compartment for the air pillow rolls.

In all honesty, the exterior design doesn’t impact the machine’s performance much. You can roughly differentiate them based on their production rate. High-end, typically more expensive machines produce air pillows much faster than low-end, inexpensive ones. They also have fewer clogging issues.

Factors to Consider When Choosing an Air Pillow Packaging Machine

There aren’t many factors you need to consider when buying air pillow packaging machines if you are running a small business. But, you may need to consider the performance benchmarks if your business is fast-paced and requires a large batch of packaging pillows.

Here are the things worth considering:

• Size: The size of the machine is important for everyone. While air pillow machines are generally small, they still occupy a lot of space in an average home. Consider getting a smaller unit if you have a small home office or a packaging area.
• Power: Power consumption is also a crucial factor for most people. Air pillow packaging machines consume roughly enough power as an average PC. That’s generally in the 200-300W ballpark. More powerful machines need more electricity, so consider that when calculating your operational cost.
• Film compatibility: One of the caveats of buying an air pillow machine is film compatibility. Some devices only work with films produced by the same manufacturers—kind of like how HP printers only work with HP ink. It’s not a design limitation of any kind. All air pillow machines are physically capable of working with off-brand film rolls. Manufacturers deliberately put sensors in the machines to make them stop working with other films, all so they can sell their own (overpriced) film. So, check if a machine is compatible with non-proprietary films before you make your purchase, and if it’s not, then consider the price tag of the manufacturer’s film roll.

• Production rate: The last factor is the production rate. Production rate refers to how many air pillows the machine can pump out in a minute. Some can pump out more than others. But faster isn’t necessarily better. Some devices can have a very high production rate but clog up and cease production altogether until you unclog them.

EASi2 from Ulinepak

If you want an affordable and highly efficient air pillow packaging machine, then we recommend the EASi2. It is a powerful unit with a fairly fast production rate. More importantly, it has a compact form factor. So you can place it just about anywhere.

EASi2 is one of the rare air pillow machines that utilizes innovative technology. It has intelligent detection sensors and other automatic features. And you can access all of those features through the highly intuitive, fully digital, on-board display.

The intelligent sensors help it detect ambient temperature to regulate its operational temperature. Such actions help it save electricity. It also helps adjust the heat sealing temperature of the air pillows themselves. It’s easy to maintain and works with various film roll types. And it requires little to no maintenance.

Hopefully, you’ve found this article helpful. In it, we tried to clear as much of your confusion about the air pillow packaging machine as possible.

Air pillow packaging machines are excellent for saving packaging costs since sourcing air pads or air pillows from retail can cost a pretty penny.

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