The act of cleaning is universal among homeowners and business professionals around the world. Nothing will work at its best capacity if it is dirty on the inside or outside, and items covered with dust or grime, or clogged with pollen, spiderwebs, or dust, might at best be visually unappealing, and at worst, dirtiness can impair an item’s function, such as a car engine, a computer, or even a firearm. Dirt, grime, and more can disrupt heat dispersion methods and cause an item to overheat, or dirt can clog moving parts and jam entire systems, and filth can corrode a surface over time and render it brittle or useless. If the items in a factory, vehicle, or public building are allowed to get too dirty, the damage from sheer grime and effects can get expensive. And dirty items and surfaces can make a bad impression on customers or guests, and this can harm business. No one would want to stay at a filthy hotel or buy a grimy and rusty machine, so a cleaning solution must be found. Traditional chemicals abound for this work, but there is a competitor: dry ice cleaning services. Just how do dry ice cleaning services work? How can the clean industry benefit from CO2 cleaning?
About Dry Ice
Dry ice cleaning services are based on just that: dry ice. What is it? Dry ice is, unlike water ice, composed of frozen carbon dioxide, and ever since dry ice cleaning services were patented in 1955, dry ice has been useful for cleaning surfaces of all kinds, delicate or not. Those who use or work around dry ice should be careful, however, since dry ice is a hazardous material in some regards. For one thing, it does not melt into a liquid like water ice does; instead, once warm enough, it will sublimate, or evaporate directly from a solid to a gas, and that gas is harmful to human beings. More specifically, a 3-5% concentration of it can cause difficulty breathing and headaches, and 7-12% may intensify those symptoms and also knock someone out. Even higher concentrations can suffocate a person and possibly even kill them. What is more, dry ice is very cold, being frozen at -79 degrees Celsius, which is easily cold enough to cause serious frostbite if a person touches it with bare skin. Due to the frostbite and breathing hazards of dry ice, only trained professionals with the right safety gear should handle it. But when used safely, dry ice can be a real boon to the cleaning industry.
Dry Ice Cleaning Services
Ever since the 1950s, dry ice has served well as as general-purpose cleaner, but what are the advantages of dry ice cleaning over chemical cleaners, and why is it so convenient? To function, a dry ice cleaner will pressurize dry ice pellets to 80-90 PSI and eject these pellets at high speeds on all kinds of surfaces, from a turbine in a power plant to cooling vents to a car engine and even stairway hand rails. One of the biggest advantages of dry ice cleaning is that with the absence of chemicals, no corrosion is possible, leaving any surface or item cleaned with dry ice unharmed. There are also no liquids involved, so even sensitive items like computer parts can be cleaned with dry ice without any harmful side effects. Dry ice leaves no residue, either; after the dry ice pellets have scoured a surface, the frozen CO2 will quickly sublimate, leaving behind absolutely nothing.
Dry ice cleaning services can be called by industrial workers, hotel managers, or even private citizens to clean nearly anything ranging from engines to computers to heavy machinery and more, and a trained crew will bring over their equipment and start blasting. Dry ice may work on all of the major hazardous material or contaminant types that can cause unsafe food, such as in a dirty kitchen. Biological contaminants include bacteria, viruses, and microscopic parasites, while chemical contaminants are cleaning solvents or pest control materials left over on a surface, and physical filth may involve hair, dirt, dust, crumbs, and more. A dirty kitchen could have dry ice cleaning done to remove any of all of those dirt types.