Prioritizing Hose Requirements

There are few vacuum scenarios worse than cleaning out a deep fryer. It’s an industry that doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it is a critical part of the restaurant industry in America. The challenge is not only oil, but the temperatures that must be dealt with. Many hoses can survive one or the other. Some products can do very well with both, but aren’t rugged enough to handle being thrown around both a job site and a work vehicle day in and day out.

What is the solution? One good option is an EPDM rubber hose with high clay content as a filler. This gray material isn’t as oil resistant as one might like, but it will handle the heat, abrasion, and daily damage done in a rough environment. When a hose lasting a year is more than acceptable, the weakness to long-term oil exposure isn’t as much of an issue.

This example makes a great point about hose specifications in general; that sometimes a hose is going to fail and it will need to be replaced as a consumable. At that point the real question becomes, “What is going to kill the hose the fastest,” and in this case it is the combination of heat and jobsite abuse.

By properly ranking the hazards it is easier to find a suitable solution. In this scenario the end users decided that heat and wear and tear were going to be the first things that would destroy the tube, followed by oil and abrasion. Had the temperatures been lower, one may have leaned toward a tube that was impact and oil resistant rather than something that was able to handle the higher temps but sacrificed oil resistance to some extent.

Not all tube requirements are the same. Make sure that you truly prioritize what you need, what you would like to have, and what really doesn’t matter. Asking for more performance than you truly need can lead to dramatically higher prices and perhaps sacrificing overall part functionality as well, if you can even find the “perfect” part.