Depending on what industry you’re in, you might have to comply with regulations that require regular wash downs throughout the day or in between different products. It’s most common in food industries where contamination is a problem but there are many instances where wash downs are part of daily life on a factory floor.
We’re assuming that whoever originally set up your servos knew that you’d be doing wash downs regularly. Different servos have different ratings for ingress protection, called IP ratings. MSK motors, for instance, can be washed down with water jets not exceeding 30 kPa at a distance of at least 3mm for three minutes at a rate of no more than 12.5 liters per minute according to the IP rating. If you’ve been doing things the same since your Indramat or Rexroth motors were installed and nothing has changed in the way of wash downs, you’re probably complying to the IP ratings and aren’t damaging your servos.
However, if you’ve changed your routines since your first servos were installed and added wash downs to your floor’s operations, you might be doing serious damage to your servos. It usually doesn’t take long to do damage during a wash down—sometimes one wash down is all it takes. Depending on what servos you have now they might be able to endure a bit of wash down without immediate damage but over time, it’s not good.
If you’ve added a wash down to your servo cleaning routines but don’t know if your servos are IP rated for the washdown, be sure that you’re complying with what your servos can handle. If you didn’t and found that you’ve damaged your servos, give us a call and we can help. Sometimes they can be salvaged and while we’re working on the problem we can give you an emergency replacement part so you can keep working.