Manual Cleaning A 100 Gallon Mixer

Q: We are looking for detergent and process recommendations for manual cleaning of a 100 gallon mixer. We make one product in the mixer which contains water, starch, acidic buffers, sucralose and preservative. Currently when cleaning, we boil for 1 hour at 90°C, then cool, drain and soak in cool water while using the mixing blades.  Scrub brushes and a spray hosing follows that. The mixer is made from stainless steel.

A: Based on what you’ve mentioned about starch and acidic buffer content, I would recommend our powerful yet drain-safe, biodegradable, mild acid cleaner Citranox® Liquid Acid Cleaner and Detergent. For a procedure, I would continue to use heat to expedite and ease cleaning. It need not be 90°C, but higher temperatures expedite cleaning.  You may find you can greatly reduce cleaning time.  If the blades can be used to create agitation, that would help during the soak.  Ensure that the rinse (at least initial rinse) is approximately the same temperature as the soak/wash temp.  This will avoid thermal shocking of micelles and redepositing of the residue.

For a robust practice, you might consider an alkaline cleaning beforehand, at least periodically, as alkaline cleaners remove organic and oily residues that may form.

More specifically, the ideal process may be: alkaline detergent – cursory rinse – acidic detergent. An example of a great manual, alkaline detergent would be either Alconox® Powdered Precision Cleaner or Liquinox® Critical Cleaning Liquid Detergent. Both are powerful emulsifiers of organic and oily residue, the former is a powder and the latter is a liquid concentrate, depending on your preference.

Note that Citranox detergent has plenty of capability of removing organic and oily residues (just less so than the aforementioned alkaline detergents).  You can certainly platform on Citranox cleaner as a single detergent for this process if a streamlined cleaning approach is desired.

You can read further about the relationship between acidic/alkaline cleaners.

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