Dryer Panel Coating

In this blog post, we discussed how functional coatings could be utilized to reduce downtime.

A prime example of such an instance is the case study of how DECC utilized a reinforced, non-stick coating to help solve a huge headache for the commercial healthcare laundry industry.

Healthcare laundry facilities have the laborious task of sorting plastic out of the linen prior to washing – this includes latex gloves, EKG stickers, tubes of ointment, ink pens, etc. No matter how many people are staffed at the front end for sorting, some plastic still inevitably makes it in the wash.

And if it makes it into the wash, it makes it into the dryers…where it melts and sticks. After time (in some instances, only a few months), a dryer completely free of debris can become so clogged with melted plastic that it looks like below.

An un-coated dryer panel with melted plastic. DECC’s coating helps eliminate this problem.

When a dryer gets to this point, the panels should be removed and cleaned.

One industry accepted method is to ice blast the panels clean. This works, but it is expensive and as soon as panels go back into the dryer, plastic starts sticking. Another way is to manually scrape the plastic off and drill out the holes, which is extremely laborious can take many hours – sometimes up to eight hours or more – to clean just one panel.

And whether you blast them clean or scrape them clean, it does not actually solve the problem.

When a local non-profit healthcare laundry facility contacted DECC six years ago and explained their issue, we applied various non-stick coatings we thought could solve their problem and had them validate each one. One particular coating vastly outperformed the others, so we applied it to every panel in their 14 dryer facility.

With the coating DECC applied on their dryer panels, the plastic build-up was greatly reduced. Any material that did stick could be easily knocked off with a plastic scraper.

After almost a year, the panels were removed for a thorough cleaning. The maintenance crew was able to clean three whole dryers (15 total panels) in the same amount of time it had previously taken them to clean just one un-coated panel.

Word of the solution made it back to the dryer OEM. Because of the coating’s performance, as well as our quality and pricing, DECC has been coating brand new panels for Jensen as an add-on option for over five years.

All in all, there are over 2400 panels in the United States that are coated by DECC. We will be at The Clean Show in New Orleans on June 20-23, booth 1020, with hopes of helping even more facilities decrease their downtime and increase their bottom line.