Sugar Silo Cleaning

We’re one of the UK’s leading sugar silo cleaning companies with experts in high-level and confied spaces cleaning. We use a range of methods to ensure that your silos are left clean, effective, and ready to use with minimal downtime and loss of product.

Why Is Sugar Silo Cleaning Important?

Sugar silo cleaning, like other types silo cleaning, is important for the general upkeep, productivity, and health and safety compliance of a business. Crystal sugar stored in large silos ( >30 m3 ) can experience lumping, caking, and other flow problems. Cleaning a sugar silo at intervals can help remove and prevent these issues. At CICS we look at the root causes of flow blockages in sugar silos and help factory operators receiving sugar from suppliers prevent them. A silo’s storage capacity can be diminished by the accumulation of sugar on the interior walls. This can become a major issue if the silo has become damp.

Still, dry sugar doesn’t frequently cluster together crystallised. Accumulations are uncommon, so this is less of an issue than with other materials. If sugar crystals do form, they can often be removed with a vacuum, and if they are wet, a whip can loosen them from their adhesive grip.

Sugar Silo Blockages and Caking

In certain circumstances, sugar can form lumps that will eventually solidify and grow larger. This caking (or lumping) of the stored sugar causes flow problems within the sugar silo. In turn it can lead to quality concerns, and loss in storage capacity and factory production. In certain circumstances, it can can also lead to safety issues.

In some cases large blocks of sugar can crystallise around around the walls of the silos. It becomes very to difficult to remove this hard crystallised sugar from a silo. The existence of these huge lumps reduces the silo’s usable capacity, increases the risk of blockage if lumps fall to the ground, and obstructs the silo’s exit. When a very huge block abruptly falls, it may occasionally hit the cone, which may cause structural damage to the silo.

Three route causes of build up and blockages in sugar silos include:

Humidity – Once the sugar is loaded into a silo, if the walls cool down enough, like at night during the cold season, the temperature near the walls can drop below the dew point, causing condensation in the area close to the wall. As sugar is soluble in water, small amounts of it dissolve. When the sugar dries again, for example when the sun comes out and heats up the silo again, the water evaporates and the dissolved sugar crystallises, forming solid bonds between the sugar particles and often sticking to the silo wall.

Silo Flow Patterns – When a silo is discharging its contents, the contents may either undergo mass flow, in which the whole contents of the silo are in motion, or funnel flow, in which just the central portion of the silo is in motion, leaving wide portions at the sides of the silos with almost no flow. If the sugar silo has a funnel flow, the sugar crystals that are most prone to caking will remain in the silo for long periods of time where they are subjected to compression, increasing the likelihood that they may form huge lumps or blocks of sugar. These sugar clusters can weigh hundreds of kilos each, making them a potential safety threat if they were to abruptly fall when the silo was nearly empty.

Speak to the Silo Cleaning Experts

CICS is one of the few UK silo cleaning firms with competence in GBAC microbiological cleaning and ISO 45001 environmental cleaning certification in addition to IRATA, PASMA, SSSTS, and IPAF, assuring superior silo cleaning services for our clients.

Our cleaning specialists use a variety of silo-cleaning techniques for all silo commodities, including sugar, flour, grain, wheat, maize, and animal feed.

We make sure that once silos have been cleaned, leftovers, residue, and discharge are not only outwardly clean but also free of microbiological microorganisms that might cause cross-contamination, spoiling, and additional harm to stored items.

For sugar silos, there are three fundamental cleaning tiers to consider:

Physically Clean – visually clean
Chemically Clean – clean to a standard where anything coming into contact with the surface suffers no chemical contamination.
Microbiologically Clean – clean and sterile so that there is no physical or microbiological contamination.

There are specific guidelines for how each type of cleaner should be used in certain situations.

Cleaning solutions with an acidic base are often the most successful at eliminating inorganic scale, whilst solutions with a caustic base are frequently the most successful at removing organic deposits such as proteins, gums, yeast, sugars, and hop residues.

The construction materials are important because caustic soda-based cleaners and other chemicals damage aluminum.

Our Sugar Silo Cleaning Service

We are fully compliant with ISSA, GBAC, and ISO 9001, 14001 & 45001 accreditation. We are also accredited members of the National Academy of Crime Scene cleaning (NACSC), and have several years of experience in cleaning contaminated commercial and public spaces. Our virus disinfection cleaning involves highly specialised techniques including ULV fogging technology and the use of ATP testing devices that are particularly suited to ambulances, police cars, and other emergency vehicles. We also have a highly qualified bio-hazard decontamination team that specialise in the cleanup of bio-hazards on industrial sites.