How to Winterize a Mistblaster Combo Skid

I am Todd with Blast Fab in Columbus. I’m going to show you today how to winterize your combo skid for wet blast and wash down.

First thing you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to disconnect the hose coming from the actual water tank, and you’re going to want to put your own garden hose. We just use a three-foot whip or garden hose and stick it straight into windshield washer fluid.

You’re actually going to want to use the windshield washer fluid because the chemical residue will not stick to the surface that you’re blasting, and it can actually evaporate before it leaves anything on the profile or anything like that.

So once we take this part of the water tank off, we connect this hose to the inlet side of your Graco pump down below the control box. And then you’re good to go for that.

You don’t need to winterize in dry blast. You’re actually going to want to go to both settings for wet blast and wash down separately so that you can get all the windshield washer fluid to go through the parts of the system that are necessary to winterize.

Make sure your pump switch is on. You’re going to hook up everything how you would in a normal blasting scenario. So you’re going to hook up all the air, all your deadman. We use a dummy nozzle instead of putting a blast hose and a nozzle on there, just for the sake of testing.

Once you have everything set up, make sure our pump switch is on. We’re going to start in wet blast here, and then you’re just going to blast, and you’ll see the windshield washer fluid pumped through the system.

The only parts of the system that you’re trying to winterize are obviously the water pump, all the lines coming in, this filter. When I initiate the deadman, you’ll see the pump switch.

And once you see the water coming out, or the liquid coming out of the end, that’s obviously going to show you that the system has it all the way through.

So then once you’re done in whichever setting you start with, whether it’s wet blast or wash down, go to the next one and then you’re just going to do the same thing.

And that’s just getting everything that needs to be, where there would be residual water or anything built up, covered in a good bit of the windshield washer fluid. And it’s going to be in the system now, ready for transport anywhere it needs to go. Can’t have any expansion of the lines and it won’t bust any of the fittings.