Oil Skimmer Blog

A belt is to a skimmer like wheels to a car’s chassis: although the latter is the most identifiable part, it needs the former to actually run. Just like tires, belts are not one size fits all. Just as there are snow tires, street tires, year-round tires, and more, so too are there a variety of belt materials. So what purpose does each serve?

Here at Abanaki, we take our core tenets seriously. Abanaki’s day-to-day processes involve cleaning our world, often in small, sustainable ways that can be adopted by multiple businesses. Today, I’d like to share a few ideas that your company can implement to make our world a little cleaner.

Choosing an oil skimmer best suited for your application will maximize oil removal while minimizing capital outlay and oil skimmer operating costs. There are 5 crucial steps that need to be considered when purchasing a skimmer for your application. Skipping one or any of these concepts can result in having zero success in removing oil from your waste water. So let’s keep that from happening and go over these 5 simple steps!

You buy an oil skimmer that will get the job done the first time around!

Waste oil recovery is critical to any application for a multitude of reasons. Many companies try, or should being trying (tsk tsk if you’re not), to recover their used oil in order to stay in compliance with government standards and regulations. No one wants to pay a massive fine or even worse, donning the orange jump suit with silver bracelets, when simply complying with the law and keeping our environment clean is a simple enough task.

An environmental engineering firm was given the task of finding a cost-effective to solution to removing heavy gear oil and quench oil from the subsurface of an automotive manufacturing facility. Additionally, the firm needed to find a solution that did not need constant supervision and required as little maintenance and down time as possible. After mulling over a series of options, the US firm decided to use Abanaki’s PetroXtractor to complete the task.

When deciding on what oil skimmer is right for your application, there are many things that need to be considered and addressed before purchasing. Knowing what size skimmer to buy all depends on specifics of the application at hand. If you think buying the biggest skimmer available is the right choice because it will get the job done faster or buying the smallest skimmer will be more cost-effective, then you would be a fool. Don’t be a fool. Let us help you pick out the right size!

At Abanaki, we are constantly looking at what aspects of our products can be improved in order to provide our customers with the best possible oil removal option. We love getting feed back, good or bad, on how our skimmers are working in the field. We recently announced the new oil concentrator for our TubeTastic! tube skimmer to help increase the skimmer's efficiency levels and decrease disposal costs. However we were learning that for some of our customers with abrasive and harsh applications, the tube skimmer wasn't able to hold it's own. So we went back to the drawing board to find a solution.

Under most operating conditions, Abanaki’s TubeTastic! picks up oil with only small traces of water or coolant. However, as surface oil is reduced to a thin layer (1/16 inch thick or less), more water (or coolant) may be picked up along with the oil. When used in tandem with the TubeTastic, the Oil Concentrator solves this problem by providing final phase separation. The result is water (or coolant) available for recycling, and virtually water-free oil for disposal.