Maintaining a scheduled cleaning program for boilers is essential to reduce costs and increase equipment life in power sector. Dirty boiler tubes -- whether the firetube or watertube type -- cause more fuel to be used and drive up heating costs. Inefficiency caused by dirty tubes also results in more frequent cycling of motors, blowers and other heating system components and can lead to costly repairs and replacements.

CONVENTIONAL METHODS OF CLEANING:

1. Chemical / acid cleaning methods can scar the metal creating a surface that quickly attracts build-up. This was done by circulating a cleaning chemical, often an acid, through the chiller to clean the tubes. Following are the disadvantages of chemical cleaning method.   

• Expensive

• Potentially dangerous to personnel and equipment

• An environmental and chemical spill risk

•  A waste handling problem

• Time consuming, adding as much as a week to the end of an outage 

2. Rod and brush cleaning methods were widely used in the past. This is a two step tube cleaning method whereby the operator first manually brushes out the tubes, then follows with a flushing of the tubes with a water hose.  Often, the residue left in the chiller tube after brushing would dry back onto the tube wall before being flushed.  All that work and the tubes were still dirty. It is time consuming, labor intensive cleaning method and can’t give satisfactory cleaning result.