Clean Up Clean Up… Everybody Do Your Part

Okay, if the title doesn’t get the song stuck in your head, maybe the YouTube video will. Whenever our kids were younger, my wife and I would start to sing this song when the kids didn’t want to help clean up, and then we would just be singing and trying to get them to clean up with the words. Eventually, they would help…

So what does this have to do with industrial compressed air? Well, the compressed air system generally starts in a remote corner or location in the facility that not many people venture to. It is often where there is minimal routine cleaning that can directly impact the well-being of the air compressors for a facility.

We’ve blogged about this many times on critical ways to improve your compressed air system, and we often touch on ensuring you have clean compressed air. That all starts with the room or areas the compressors are housed in. If you keep the area clean and keep the air exchanging there, then the compressor has clean, fresh air to entrain and begin the compression process. If your compressor condensate drain just goes into a puddle and oil dry gets thrown on top of it, then that dust and debris all begin to become airborne over time. That gets entrained into the intake and not to mention the smell and biomass that begins to generate is rather foul. If oil or some other lubricant gets spilled and not cleaned up when it happens, then when a real leak develops on the compressor it can’t be found because the area is already covered in oil and grime that never gets cleaned.

When trying to perform preventative maintenance and the area is littered with debris, oil dry, unused parts, and dimly lit, you can’t easily see or find all the maintenance points on the equipment and will often spend more time trying to clean the area up than the actual maintenance takes. Adding a cleaning process to the weekly routine of the area is one of the best things that can be done for the compressor room/area. It makes operators more aware of where the compressed air is coming from and should anything not look right, it makes it easier to see and report.

If you would like to talk about other key components to optimizing your compressed air system, contact an Application Engineer today.

Brian Farno, Application Engineer