Ice Blasting Comes to the Fore, Sandblasting Drifting Away

Ice blasting technology, used for years by the Boeing Co. to clean molds and Starbucks to clean coffee-roasting equipment, has been repackaged for smaller businesses.

Contractors and architects are discovering that ice pellets generally do a better job than sandblasting or water-blasting techniques and leave no residue to clean up.

“My compressor blows a high-pressure stream of small ice pellets through a nozzle that can reach to even remote places,” says Bill Finley, owner of Bellingham-based West Coast Ice Blasting.

Although he varies the pressure for various tasks, it’s not the power of the stream that does the work, it’s the thermal shock.

“When carbon dioxide pellets frozen to - 110 degrees Fahrenheit hit any surface, the mold or corrosion freezes instantly, cracks and falls off, leaving minimal debris to clean up,” Finley says. “The ice pellets simply evaporate almost instantaneously. With sand or water, there’s the inevitable cleanup that can take hours or even days.”

For 15 years, when Finley was in the home restoration business, he used to strip mold off log homes with ground-up corn cobs. It worked well but cleaning up the mess afterward presented its own problems. Then he found that ice blasting cleans the mold off even better, with nothing to sweep up.

For example, at CHEMCO, a Ferndale, Wash., fire retardant wood-treating facility, the firm lost time cleaning contaminated heat exchangers in its drying kilns. It was an expensive process that included shutting the kilns down for sandblasting, then cleaning up the sand.

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“With ice pellets I cleaned the kiln so fast that they were moving shingles into the kiln at one end while I was finishing up at the other end because they had nothing major to clean up,” Finley says. “Their savings in the time it took them to get equipment back on line was huge.”

He adds that since the process is approved by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, it can be used in milk-producing plants or food-service areas. Because of the cold temperature, the dry ice pellets also sterilize treated areas, Finley says.

“In many industries, dry ice blasting fits in perfectly with lean manufacturing standards because it’s more efficient to have molds cleaned with dry ice pellets than to pay employees to do hand-cleaning with solvents,” Finley adds.