Preventing full scale laundry fires

Customer contact is the first step in fire prevention. The customer service team needs to know what kind of soiling - cleaning fluids, spa oils, meat fats or engineer oils - is likely to be on the textiles that customers send in. Printers' wipers, which are in a class of their own, are unlikely to be accepted but cleaning fluids and essential oils are just as deadly.

Consulting the laundry detergent supplier is the next step. Most suppliers have excellent emulsifiers for aiding the removal of potentially flammable contaminants to avoid excessive detergent costs.

These special ingredients need to be matched to the oils or fats to be removed. The critical factor is the hydrophilic lipophilic balance (the HLB value) of the emulsifier, which must be matched to the HLB value of the contaminant.

Failure to do this is the main reason for the failure of an emulsifier to do the job intended.Typically engineers' oils might have an HLB value of 14 - 16, chicken fats around 11 - 13 and essential oils 7 - 9. Matching the contaminant to the emulsifier is a task for a detergent supplier who is an expert in this area.

However, when the correct match is achieved the emulsifier can have a dramatic effect. The blue haze disappears, the spa towels suddenly smell sweet and the hidden fire risks are reduced by about one hundred-fold.

It was once thought that for the emulsifier to be truly effective, risky work should be processed in a washer-extractor but the leading detergent suppliers have now demonstrated that success can also be achieved in a tunnel washer. This is a great step forward.