Write the scope down as the guard and housing family, not as a machine name
The first thing an assessment has to fix is what is actually being cleaned, because guards and housings are not one uniform duty. A guard is usually a painted steel or mesh panel, sometimes perforated, sometimes a polycarbonate window, often removed and refitted at every changeover. A housing is a cast motor frame with cooling fins, a stainless control enclosure with a hinged door and a gasket, or a sheet-metal shroud held on by thumb screws. Each behaves differently under heat and moisture, and each has its own idea of what clean means.
So the assessment lists the items surface by surface. On the guard side: outer faces and edges, perforations and mesh, cut-outs and louvres, hinge and latch hardware, handles, quick-release fasteners, and the underside of the guard where fallout collects. On the housing side: motor frames and their cooling fins, gearbox and bearing housings, pump and fan casings, control cabinet exteriors, junction boxes, terminal box lids, cable glands, drain and vent plugs, and breathers. Anything electrical or rotating that has a seal is a decision point, not a surface.
State the exclusions with the same care. Encoder and linear-scale housings, bearing gaps, air intakes, fan inlets, cable runs and connectors, nameplates and warning labels, and interlock hardware stay out of the wet work. If a guard is removed for a job, the assessment says who removes it, where it is cleaned, and how it is verified before it goes back; that keeps cleaning decisions off the safety functions of the machine.
Record the deposits, because they decide the process
A guard and housing clean is a deposit removal job, and the deposit is what the assessment has to describe. In a machining area the usual mix is cutting oil and coolant residue holding fine swarf, a baked-on film on warm surfaces, and dust packed into perforations. On drive and conveyor guarding it is often lubricant smeared with abrasive dust. In food or packaging areas it is sugar or starch film plus organic residue. A supplier who knows the mix can talk sensibly about whether heat alone does the work, whether a detergent step belongs in the sequence, and whether a rinse and recovery step is needed afterwards.
Age matters as much as type. A film laid down since the last planned clean behaves differently from a deposit that has been cooking on a warm housing for months. The cheapest way to describe this is to note when each area was last cleaned and what was used, and to say which items have never been steam-cleaned at all. That one line changes what a supplier proposes, and it is also the honest starting point for any trial.
Where a coating is at stake, say so. Older painted guards can have chips and repairs where water can get under the film. The assessment should name those items so the trial is run on the worst of them rather than on the best.
Map the openings before anyone asks about steam
Guards have holes by design, and housings have seams, so the assessment needs a simple map of where water and vapour can get in. Louvres and vent slots, drive-through cut-outs for belts and shafts, gaps around door frames and gaskets, unused knockouts in cable entries, the small clearance behind a fan cowl, and drain holes that route liquid somewhere specific all belong on the list. Beside each one, record what sits behind it.
Then record what has to be covered or protected for the job: the interior of an open enclosure, an exposed shaft end, a bearing gap, a gasket that has been disturbed, a label that must stay legible. Covering is a real cost in labour and it belongs in the plan rather than being discovered at the machine. The assessment should also note which guards have to be removed and refitted, because refitting, checking the interlock and closing the job is part of the time and the responsibility.
Describe the site conditions that constrain the equipment
Most cleaning failures on guards and housings are site failures, not machine failures. The assessment should therefore describe the ground the equipment works on. How much floor width does the aisle give? Can the unit travel from one bay to the next without crossing a doorway, a ramp or a cable trunking that people must not trip over? How far is the furthest machine from the point where the unit is fed and refilled, and can hoses and cables reach that machine without running across a walkway?
Write down what the site can actually supply: where the power point is, and whether it is on a circuit that maintenance can isolate with the machine; where a water feed is, and whether it is suitable for the equipment the site is considering; where run-off can go and who recovers it. Then add the access conditions: the working height of the top of the tallest housing, whether an overhead pass means standing on something, whether the floor under and around the machine can get wet while production continues, and which passes have to wait for a planned stop. If guards can only be cleaned during a shutdown window, say how long that window is and who signs the machine back over.
Whether the cleaning unit travels on a battery or is fed from the building changes that whole picture, so state the constraint and ask the supplier which of their industrial steam cleaning equipment options fit it. A hand-pushed unit and a unit fixed at one wash point are not interchangeable on a line with twenty guarded machines, and the assessment is where that difference should surface. customized steam cleaning equipment is a fair request at this stage only if the assessment can show the volume and the layout that justify it.
Say what clean looks like, guard by guard
"Clean" has to be testable or the assessment is not worth much. Split the surfaces into classes and write one acceptance line per class: bare machined ways and slideways must be free of film and loose swarf; painted guard panels must be free of fresh deposit with the coating intact and no lifting at an existing chip; perforated mesh must be clear enough to see light through at a stated reference point; a housing exterior may keep the discoloration it had before and is judged only on loose deposit and oil film.
Then say who inspects and when. A practical rule is to inspect once the surface has dried, because a wet surface reads clean and a drying surface shows the residue back. Wiping a folded light cloth along an edge and looking at what it picks up is a repeatable check that anyone can do. Anything that has been removed is checked twice: clean, dry, fastened, interlock verified.
Ask the maintenance team which items take longest and why. Their answers, in their own words, belong in the assessment: guards that need two people to remove, awkward sections behind a belt drive, hardened residue at a corner that nobody reaches, housings whose fins are only reachable from above. Those answers set the schedule and the crew size, and they are exactly the detail a supplier needs to advise on factory machinery degreasing rather than to quote a machine off a list.
Ask for the machine rows the assessment cannot supply
The assessment is not the place to assume specifications, and some figures are not published consistently across product pages. Ask for them in writing, as rows, and let the supplier fill them in: the heating and supply requirements of the unit under consideration, what the water feed has to be, the reach of the hose and lance, the footprint and mass of the unit and whether it clears the aisle recorded in the assessment, the accessory set offered for panel and fin work, and what happens at the end of a shift with the run-off.
Ask the same question about control: which settings are adjustable, who can change them, and how a set-up is recorded so that the next shift repeats it. For battery-fed options ask what a charge covers in the layout you drew, not in the supplier's yard.
Run one bounded trial on the worst guard you have
Pick one guard and one housing that carry the hardest realistic case: the perforated panel with packed dust, or the finned motor frame with baked oil. Record the preparation, the covering, the passes, the drying time, the refit and the inspection as one timed job, and let the maintenance technician who does it say what went wrong. Do not add a contingency to that figure at the assessment stage; the number is only worth what its conditions are worth.
The trial result should be written as answers to five questions. Did the coating survive? Did any opening take moisture, and how was that found? Was the acceptance line reachable without rework? Did the unit fit the aisle and reach the machine? Did the refit and inspection add more time than the cleaning itself? Those five answers decide the recommendation more reliably than any feature list.
Hand over a short pack, not a long report
The assessment is only finished when someone can quote from it. A working pack is short, and each page has a name against it:
- a scope sheet of guards and housings in scope, by area, with the exclusions listed alongside
- a deposit sheet naming the soil per area and when it was last cleaned
- an openings and protection sheet with what sits behind each one
- a site sheet covering access, power, water, run-off recovery and the shutdown windows that exist
- an acceptance sheet with one testable line per surface class and the named inspector
- the timed trial record and the blank rows the supplier has to complete
Keep that pack and re-read it at the next planned stop. Guard and housing soiling changes with the product being run and the season, and an assessment drawn once quietly goes out of date. Whoever re-walks the same areas and corrects the deposit sheet, the access notes and the trial timings is the one who keeps the cleaning plan honest.
A site assessment earns its keep by removing the supplier's guesswork. If the scope, the deposits, the openings, the site constraints and the acceptance lines are already on paper, the conversation moves from "which machine should I buy" to "which of these fits this line, this aisle and this shutdown window" - and that is the question worth asking before anything is specified. PowerDe works from enquiries of this kind through its intelligent cleaning equipment manufacturer engineering side, so the pack above is the form of enquiry that gets a concrete answer.
