Oil should be scrubbed, says Caterpillar.

lightninboy · Nov 3, 2009

I was at the Big Iron show in West Fargo, North Dakota, this year, and there was an outfit there, Oil Transfer Systems LLC, selling oil scrubbers and it said even new oil is full of abrasives and Caterpillar dealers scrub all the new oil they put into engines even though they sell their own brand of unscrubbed oil.

Oil Transfer Systems, Oil recycle and scrubber cart, Doug Mickelson

I didn't disagree with what they said, but I didn't feel like rearranging my life on account of it.

Cami · Nov 4, 2009

I seem to remember reading a story about a Hitachi dealer in Western Canada providing "scrubbing" as part of their regular maintenance service.

I'm with you: Clean is good but I'm not going to go crazy. While hydraulic oil that looks clean to the human eye isn't necessarily up to spec. for your system, I've never had trouble come from just putting it in straight from the bucket.

Don't get me wrong, I'm big on preventive maintenance and avoiding unscheduled downtime but the law of diminishing returns applies here; at some point the cost of services like this exceed the cost you place on unscheduled downtime.

I do see a use for this rig though: Simply put, some old machines have a lot of duck poop in the hydraulics and benefit from cleaning. Also, if something makes a mess of things, like a nasty pump failure, this may be a cheap, easy way of cleaning out the hydraulic system. I haven't run into it, but an old co-worker told the story of a machine in which debris-laden hydraulic oil wore right through the hard lines....yikes.