When it comes to keeping your silo clean and running efficiently day in and day out, it’s vital that you are proactive with preventive silo maintenance. One of the most important is checking your silo roof and walls to make sure they are leakproof.
Many concrete silos have either a membrane cover, a concrete slab or other material covering the silo roof. Over time, roof covers develop holes, allowing water intrusion under the roof cover material. Once the water gets underneath, it is trapped and eventually travels along the concrete roof to a crack. Once the trapped water finds an opening, water can make its way into the silo and compromise stored materials. Natural freeze and thaw cycles allow water to expand and contract inside fine exterior cracks and jeopardize a silo’s structural stability.
Our Roof-Top and Exterior Wall Coating Method
It’s essential that your silo is completely watertight. Even pinhole leaks in silo roofs and walls can damage stored materials and can result in blockages and material flow issues. When selecting a roof covering for a concrete silo, it is critical to select a coating that adheres directly to concrete, rather than a roof cover that merely conceals the concrete roof and can hide future issues.
This sealing method can be used for roof surfaces or for steel bolted silo joints to offer excellent protection against oxidation, humidity and corrosive environments. Our rubberized coating also resists alkali, salts, abrasions and fumes.
Additional benefits of roof-top silo coatings:
Not a floating membrane
Offers excellent adhesion to aluminum, galvanized steel, painted surfaces, modified bitumen, steel joints and many other surfaces
Excellent in sealing cracks, laps, fasteners and roof surface penetrations
Available in all 50 states and in a variety of colors
Our rubber coating reduces costly reapplications of surface protectants and can be applied to many surfaces including: metal buildings and roofs, built up roof (BUR) membranes, grain silos and bins, silo exterior walls, single ply roofs, urethane foam roofs and steel bolted joints.
A clean silo is comparable to a clean bill of health. When a storage silo is working efficiently, it's successfully meeting production goals. If a silo gets clogged or blocked, production slows down immediately and an array of problems and issues become inevitable. Despite the problems that can arise from a poorly maintained silo, many postpone cleaning and often deem this required maintenance as unnecessary. They may also find silo cleaning expensive and not worth the potential loss of production downtime.
The fact is: silo cleaning is a cost savings benefit that removes buildup and recovers lost material, while maximizing production and profit.
Why Routine Silo Cleaning Matters
Hung up, clogged or slow running silos are a problem that will interfere with efficiency and profitability. Material buildup deters the silo from reaching its full capacity and we have seen many cases where material buildup and blockages only allowed for the silo to reach half of its capacity. Once a silo begins to lose flow, this accelerates the buildup over time and can lead to additional blockages. It is extremely important that the silo be cleaned professionally if material buildup or other issues are visible.
Professional Cleaning - Let Our Experts Do the Job
We are your resource for silo cleaning. No matter the type of silo (concrete, steel, flat or cone bottom, funnel or mass flow) or type of material stored (cement, clay, fly ash, grain products and more), we are your professional team of experts. Our specialists are also trained to respond quickly to emergency silo cleaning needs, although our goal is to eliminate emergency plant outages related to silo blockages entirely.
As soon as a partial blockage becomes apparent, it's necessary to schedule a cleaning. Our silo cleaning methods will:
Remove material buildup
Restore material flow rates
Recover silo capacity
Prevent cross contamination
Reclaim lost material
The Boss - Silo Cleaning Equipment
Professional silo cleaning companies typically use a remote, dry cleaning system to remove stubborn material buildup. The most powerful system available in the U.S. is a unique clean-out head, The Boss, proprietary to USA Silo Service. The Boss removes the most material buildup in the least amount of time, making it the most efficient and cost-effective cleaning system available. It’s many times more powerful than a whip cleaning machine and two-thirds more powerful than pneumatic cleaning systems.
The Boss is a unique clean-out head designed to accommodate variable attachments which are selected by our field crews to match the type of material being removed. Our silo cleaning technique includes operating in a systematic pattern within the silo to remove the toughest build-ups.
In fact, The Boss is 65% more powerful than other pneumatic systems. By removing more material faster and with more efficiency than any other clean-out method, including the whip system, The Boss accelerates the cleaning process. This minimizes downtime and out time on-site, providing immediate cost-savings.
Learn more about the advantages of The Boss cleaning system in the video below.
