Specializing In Pressure Washing Heavy Equipment

Pressure washing heavy equipment is one of Wash On Wheels’ specialties.

We’ve done all types of machinery from compact forklifts to 300 ton cranes.  Most of the heavy equipment washing we do is focused on removing mud and grease.  These are always time consuming projects because grease likes to splatter from one surface to the next rather than just wash away.  This means every surface gets hit multiple times from multiple angles.

Atlas Copco (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Pressure Washing A Truck Mounted Drilling Rig

One exception to the norm is when we wash heavy mining equipment for Atlas Copco.  Most of the time they call us out, the equipment hasn’t been used yet.  In fact when they have us pressure wash their mining equipment, it’s usually to remove the special coating of cosmoline that is applied before its shipped from overseas.  Atlas has us come out to remove this cosmoline before they transport it to the buyer.

Before we could do any work for Atlas Copco, we had to get a special permit from the waste water treatment district where their property is located. The district there is the South Adams County Water & Sanitation District.  We had to set up a wash using a specific cleaning agent and have SACWSD take a sample of our wash water runoff to test it before giving us a permit to recover the water and discharge it to the sanitary sewer.

Pressure Washing Heavy Equipment At A Mine

After the test water was approved, we were able to wash several pieces of heavy equipment for Atlas Copco.  We recovered all our water and discharged it to the sanitary sewer according to the specifications of our permit.  Washing cosmoline off of painted metal is much easier than pushing grease around, but is still time consuming because the cleaning agent we were allowed to use doesn’t break down the cosmoline very well, so we have to use lots of pressure and hot water to strip it off.

Construction Equipment Pressure Washing

In the process of washing the metal, we discovered just how easy it is to blast off stickers – oops!  They had no choice but to leave the cosmoline around and on the stickers because all the stickers on the mining equipment is required by law to be there.  Other than that, the equipment cleaned up nicely and we left it looking shiny new.  Our processes made both the water district and the Atlas Environmental Manager (click here to see the letter) happy while still getting the equipment back to its new look for the customer.

How the regulations on pressure washing heavy equipment apply varies from one job-site to the next.  If you have equipment that’s in need of cleaning, hire a professional pressure washing company like Wash On Wheels to insure that you are in compliance with any regulations that affect your specific situation.