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Long draw cleaning questions

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  • Long draw cleaning questions

    Hello,

    We have recently taken over cleaning our own lines at our restaurant/beer bar and now have learned enough to have a couple questions that I can't find answered in my searches. Our system has 30 lines all about 110-120' in length. We are using a ECB300plus pump system.

    The reason we have taken over cleaning is that the line cleaning company hired by all the distributors has not been doing a very good job. They are cleaning only with pot's and soaking and somehow are able to clean our entire 30 tap system in just a couple hours. After over a year of complaining we simple decided to do it ourselves.

    In any event, here are our questions.

    1) How many lines/feet can you safely/effectively clean with the 300plus? We first ran 6 lines and got decent flow and much better cleaning than soaking shown by the fact that I cleaned just after the line cleaning company and got a nice dark liquid out after our rinse and the cleaning solution had run for a bit. I then tried 8 lines with not much reduction in flow and it seemed to clean just as effectively. I'd like to go 10 lines which would take our cleaning regimen from 4 sessions (8,8,8,6) to 3 sessions (10,10,10). Perhaps regular cleaning with 10 lines with a quarterly run of only 6 or 4? I know that the faster flow is better but any flow is much better cleaning than what we were getting before with the pot method correct?

    2) Any tips for speeding up the process? I have figured out some speed tips that have helped like dropping the intake to the pump into the cleaning solution when the cold pre-rinse has cleared out the first two lines, starting the timer and the going back to ice cold rinse when the timer hits 20 min. Seems like there isn't any need to have water throughout the entire system before staring the cleaning and no reason to run the cleaning more than the 20 min each line would get using this method. The one thing that this doesn't speed up though is the final rinse. It simply takes a long time to get that rinse water through all the lines and fully rinse out the cleaning solution.

    3) Is it possible to run two separate loops of lines run in parallel? I.e. put a splitter on the outlet of the pump with each end going to a separate loop and then having two separate return lines? This could either double our lines cleaned per run or half the rinse time if we did 2 loops of 4 lines.

    Last question
    4) I made a boneheaded newbie mistake yesterday. Since I didn't know how long it has been (if ever) since the line cleaners ran an acid clean I did one yesterday for our regular cleaning. I didn't realize that you still need to run an alkaline cleaner through first and then rinse and then acid. I simply cleaned with the acid. So, can the acid do anything bad if you haven't cleaned with alkaline first? Assuming no bad was done, did anything good happen either? Did I completely waste that session and should I clean again next week or sooner or did I probably get at least some cleaning action. I did get a nice cloudy runoff during the acid recirc after having nice clear water running through so I feel like it wasn't a complete waste.

    Thanks for all your help!
    Mark
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