How to compare dry ice blasting systems

Comparing Cold Jet dry ice blasting systems with other systems is an easy 5-step process. Do not buy another product unless you have first compared it with a Cold Jet solution. Cold Jet systems are available to rent for your testing purposes.

1. Dry Ice Blast Cleaning Test Setup:

• Use your own air supply for all testing. If you don't have the required air supply necessary for your particular dry ice blast cleaning application, it's important to learn this before you purchase a system.
• The systems being compared should be hooked to the air supply at the same air supply junction point. To ensure the blast systems are seeing the same air resources, and also to help extend the test long enough to expose any equipment freeze-up problems, it is best simply to hook and unhook each blast machine at this junction point for each blast sample being cleaned.

2. Test the dry ice hopper feed reliabilities:

• A poorly designed hopper will frequently encounter bridging, clumping, and feed port clogging which will require the dry ice to be manually broken with a stick. This is not only frustrating and time consuming; it can often result in unnecessary damage to the blast system.
• Inferior hopper design will not show itself with only a few scoops of fresh pellets; however, filling the hopper completely full of pellets and allowing the system to sit for 10-15 minutes before blasting will likely indicate any serious hopper design flaws.

3. Test the cleaning performance and ice consumption:

• You should have multiple samples or critical clean components ready for test cleaning – the dirtier, the better. Similar portions of the test samples should be equally sized for each system to be tested. A stopwatch should be available for recording blast times.
• Because dry ice pellets are consumed during system usage, the ongoing cost of dry ice pellets and the labor are typically just as important as the initial blast system cost justification. It is important to determine which available blast system cleans the fastest and what the ice consumption is that corresponds to this optimum blast performance.

4. Evaluate the available nozzles and accessories:

• Components within a physically restricting environment should be made part of the test to verify an appropriate blast applicator is available for cleaning such components.
• Systems with only a handful of general-purpose nozzles are one-size-fits-all machines. And there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution.

5. Evaluate the manufacturer of your system:
Ask a series of important questions:

• How long has the company been in business?
• How long have they been making dry ice blasting equipment?
• How many engineers do they have working on their dry ice blasting technology?
• Do they have worldwide distribution and customer support?