Going through coolant like toilet paper!

I’ve always felt like I have to top up the tank reasonably frequently, but lately it has been getting insane! I’ve been doing a small production run of a part lately. I’ve run the machine 8 hours a day for a couple of days and I’ve had to top the tank up enough times that I’ve gone through half of a gallon of 251c concentrate! And that’s just keeping the coolant above 5%! A little bit splashes outside the tank as it drips down and flashes off the chip catcher. I feel like a lot of it gets caught up in the masses of chips I’ve been creating. But even with that I’m having a hard time figuring out where literally gallons are going! And it’s not just evaporating water because the coolant isn’t getting concentrated over time as the level goes down.
Where does it all go?

What’s the temperature in your shop and relative humidity? In my experience aluminum soaks up more fluid also finer chips eat a lot more. Also When I fill up I spray down the interior of the enclosure and the chips to wash dried coolant down. If it’s hot and dry you will loose a lot of coolant. My experience is based on an 1100mx

Hot? Very. Usually 90 plus. AC died a while back and haven’t gotten around to dealing with it yet. Area has extremely high humidity during the summer months. I dehumidify the shop down to 45% though to fight rusting issues. But everywhere the coolant hangs out is fully enclosed so it shouldn’t have to fight the dehumidifier too much. Also, if the dehumidifier was the issue I would imagine I would only lose water content and therefore see my coolant concentrations rise as I lost volume. Which doesn’t appear to be the case.

Based on your dried coolant on chips comment I think this is where the gold is! I’ve been making way more chips lately than ever before and having to clean out the enclosure regularly. I bet I’m just pulling out coolant attached to chips. I have an idea! I will likely take a few 5 gallon buckets, drill holes in the bottom and stack that on top of a normal bucket. Allow coolant to drain out and also gives me the option to do a water wash as well to get any dried!

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I usually bag my chips and put the bags in a plastic bucket with a hole at the bottom. Then in another bucket the same size. It’s basically a greasy mess in the bottom bucket. I guess the water evaporates. I never tried recycling the greasy stuff at the bottom but it’s probably concentrated coolant with way oil and superfine chips. You could probably reuse it but just take the liquid in the middle.

I’m going to give this a try! Thank you!

I did the double bucket with holes idea today. Poured a gallon of dehumidifier water, which is what I use since it’s free and demineralized, through an almost full 5 gallon bucket of chips. What I got back was a gallon of beautiful, clean 5% concentration coolant! That’s only ever so slightly below what I run my coolant concentration! I’ve been throwing away gold! I’m going to try a second wash of those same chips tomorrow and see what I get.

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I did one more gallon through those same chips. While it did come out that milky white that 251c is, it only measured out to 1% concentration and what was slowly dripping off the bucket still was 0%.

So it looks like two or so gallons of wash through 4-5 gallons of chips is where the benefits end. You get a gallon or so of good coolant back and the another of great top up liquid.

I’ll take that all day!