And so I'd like to just cover briefly some maintenance tips for the vapor degreaser.
Check Water Separator
One of those is frequently checking your water in your water separator, making sure that's drained off. And the reason for that is that most of the cleaning solutions now, the cleaning solvents, are halogenated and in the presence of water, they can go acidic on you. It's not necessarily going to hurt the part. It could, but not necessarily. What you're generally concerned about is harm to the inside of the unit.
When you do your preventative maintenance, which can consist of, once the system is cool and shut down, you can drain your water separator, make sure all the water's out of it, you can trend that when you first get your unit to see how often that needs to be. It could be once a week, once a day, once a shift, depending on the throughput and the capacity of your unit.
You just need to be able to tell when it's about time. So, that's going to have to be trended with the new unit and or a new chemistry. So, work with your equipment and your chemistry manufacturers, and they can certainly guide you along on that.
Check Filters and For Any Sign of Corrosion
So, when you're doing inspections during your PM, check for hot spots, little rust spots, because that's indicative of something's attacking the sumps or any of the plumbing inside. There's a lot of different things that you can check depending on how your unit is equipped. There's filtration, there's pumps, there's plumbing lines all on the inside that you can't see from here. Some units are designed with separate desiccant units. Those need to be checked periodically and replaced. So, there's just a lot of maintenance issues that need to be attended to just as part of good practices.
When to Change Out the Solvent
Now, as far as when to know when the sump is loaded, when the boil sump is loaded, because all of the cleaning is done over the boil sump. So, all the contaminants are contained there. You don't want to contaminate your clean sump. So, everything that you do, where you're removing the soils, will be done over the boil sump. The way to tell when that does, and you can get with, number one, your equipment manufacturer, but more importantly, your chemistry manufacturer and generally it's a rise in temperature and also a rise in density of the material. And they can show you how to check that. They can show you where the set points need to be if your system is so equipped, and it will just kind of check that temperature automatically.
But if you see a rise of about five, six degrees centigrade, time to check that boil sump.
Anytime that you have issues with the vapor degreaser, obviously call your equipment manufacturer. They'll be happy to guide you through that, or perhaps if it's, if it's a fairly serious, they can send a technician out your way and help you get back into your production mode.
And so if you have any further questions, please feel free to join us on the website. There's a technical phone line. There's also an email that you can send us with technical questions.
Resources
Vapor Degreasing: The Quick Guide
