When cleaning in your home, you use specific products for specific tasks; dishwasher detergent cleans your dishes while laundry soap cleans your clothes. The same principle applies to cleaning your milking robot. Cleaning products from the Astri line not only keep your robot operating at peak efficiency, the cleaning agents reduce the risk of germs to keep cow health issues to a minimum.
Knowing no farm is the same, Lely’s Astri products are designed to insure robust cleaning performance. The Astri Line is built as an alkaline detergent. This means the detergent uses specialized surfactants, also known as workhorse detergent ingredients, which are used to penetrate and release soils from the surface. Surfactants also help keep the soils suspended in the wash solution, so they don’t redeposit on equipment surfaces. When the wash is done, the surfactants also make it easier to rinse out residual dirt, which won’t affect subsequent acid cleaning steps.
Builders are another important component of the detergent, which work together with surfactants to improve detergency, especially under poor water quality conditions. Water quality—most often related to water hardness—can decrease detergency power and make soils harder to remove. Builders help make the detergent system more robust under these conditions.
Going back to our first example: Would you use dish soap as a laundry detergent? The dish soap will not provide the results you need for cleaning clothes. While these different detergents contain some of the same basic categories of ingredient, such as surfactants and builders, they must be optimized against the specific soils, surfaces and application conditions. Astri provides this optimization, offering superior cleaning across all application conditions.
Additionally, milking equipment cleaning is an important element of ensuring quality milk. Inconsistent cleaning can lead to the development of biofilms—soil deposits that can harbour and protect microorganisms from the actions of your sanitizer and introduce microorganisms to the milk. Proper cleaning, inspection, and maintenance of milking equipment are important for assuring the highest quality milk.
As a side note, one simply needs to look around the house to see how cleaning is not as simple as just alkalinity. Detergents must be designed and optimized for their use. Read more here.