Extend Your Coolant Life With Simple Maintenance Tips
Charging A Machine Sump
When charging a machine sump, make sure the sump is clean. Adding new coolant on top of old coolant remnants is a bad practice. If you don’t have a lot of time to tear down a system for a deep clean, you can use a sump cleaner on top of your old coolant like our Astro-Clean A. Add 3-5% of sump volume, run for a min. of 24 hours, then dump, rinse and recharge.
Frequent checks of the coolant concentration (several times per week) using a refractometer is probably the best thing you can do to maintain coolant quality. You can use our Coolant Calculator on our website, to convert your brix reading to percentage. Takes a minute or two to do; can save you significant money on tooling, coolant costs and you’ll get better finishes. In addition high concentrations can have a negative effect on your operators, plus it’s just a waste of money with no gain in efficiency.
Tramp oil removal is also a key. Tramp oil can be the cause of “Monday Morning Odor”
and it also breaks down the coolant. Simple fixes: use an oil skimmer or a shop vac to pull off tramp oil off the surface of the sump. Install an oxygenator or a simple fish tank bubbler to aerate and keep the tramp oil from forming a barrier layer.
Coolant Calculator
There are a lot of resources on our web site, including a short (30 sec) video of how to use the Coolant Calculator. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us. You can speak with our lab team and they can help. They all have extensive field/practical experience, so if you have a question or problem, they have probably seen it before. We are all here to do our best for our customers.