My Wash Bath Looks Dirty, Are My Parts?

You had mentioned excess foaming can be an indicator of a soil loaded bath, do you mean the presence of any foam?
Not necessarily. You will see some foam in a cleaning process what’s referred to as agitation foam and that’s generated by the action of the pumps and the movement of the parts within the chemistry. You’ll see this especially in spray-in-air systems so some foam is acceptable and part of the process, but it should quickly dissipate once the process is over and go back to filling normal ranges. Anything out of the ordinary such as really tight forming bubbles that overflow onto the floor, that’s not good.

When I change the wash bath should I also change out the rinse tanks at the same time?
Yes, because you should change the entire cleaning process. Rinse is a very critical part of the cleaning process and if you are changing out the wash tanks and bringing the clean parts into dirty rinse tanks then you’re not really helping the process overall so change everything all at once then you have a good zero base line and you’re starting fresh every time.

I don’t have method of removing oil from my wash bath, what do you recommend?
For solvent cleaning application there is the KYZEN Kapture that does a great job of removing the soils. For an aqueous process there are oil coalescers and standalone bag filters and cartridge filters that can be purchased and installed on your machine. They will greatly help lengthen the life of your bath. Those are available via internet or KYZEN Regional Manager.

Why do you prefer conductivity for measuring the wash bath chemistry concentration over other methods you have mentioned?
The presentation on the 15^th Ethan Mueller will talk in more detail about this, but we have found the conductivity meter is least effected by soil loading. Oils and coolants can throw off the pH of the wash bath and it can also affect the refractometer. It works on basically refracting light, so it just tells any soils and has a hard time distinguishing chemistry from the soils so that’s really the reasoning why we recommend the conductivity meter.

Any final advice for someone when they find out that their bath is loaded and can’t figure out why?
You should call KYZEN Regional Manager, we will be there to help as much as we can. You don’t want the wash bath to get to the point where you’re no longer able to clean parts so the idea is to develop a process and method when its almost too soil loaded and that’s when you want to change it. We would like to have the process for you run as long as it can as well as it can and use as least as it can that’s really what we’re all about.