“Is your "Team" trained?”

Does your company have good house keeping practices? Do your employee's follow safety procedures? With a case study done by big business, good house keeping around your equipment can save thousands of maintenance dollars each year.

Training is a big part of everyday maintenance operations. It's the little things that you can do to your equipment that will make it run longer and more efficient. Keeping the oil compartment clean and wiped down, changing breather filters and elements, using clean, wiped down funnels, always using clean oil cans, and keeping oil drums closed and away from contamination. These are just a few ideas out of hundreds that will work for many companies such as yours.

Here's another… when transferring oil from barrel to tank or vice versa, always use a pump with a filtering system on it. With a case study done by Grahame Fogel, you can reduce the ISO reading from 20/17 to an 18/15 by just filtering the oil one time. That is a major cleaning and a great reduction of particles that will cause harm to any piece of equipment.

A great practice is to have a small filtering cart in your plant or construction area for cleaning oil. New oil is great, but not always clean. Used barrels or transfers from truck to barrels can cause contamination and that means dirty oil. We have done our own case study at LubeTrak by doing an oil analysis test on a new barrel of ISO32 hydraulic oil right from the barrel. The ISO reading was: 17/14, which would pass any manufacturers specification. Using a Filtakleen Filtration cart to pump the oil from one barrel to another, the ISO reading had dropped to: 16/13 with only one pass. So we tried another pass through the filters and dropped it one more time to a: 15/13. We we're truly amazed. With this information, a typical hydraulic system could run up to 3 times as long without changing oil by just cleaning the oil before using it in your application.

Always make sure to use a clean oil can when adding oil to your engine or hydraulic system. Cross contamination from other oils can cause a problem and using a dirty oil can, will always add contamination, dirt, or water into your lubrication system.

Steel oil breathers have become a true problem in hydraulic systems and engines. The steel or iron element inside the breather, can rust causing iron and other contaminants to show up in oil samples or just cause wear inside your engine or hydraulic system.

These are just a few ideas that can be applied at your place of work to help maintain your equipment and keep things running longer for better production and efficiency.

We are still waiting to post your replies from last weeks letter about changing from synthetic to a mineral base oil. We will post the results from everybody on next week's letter. Send your comments to: synthetics@lubetrak.com

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