Bill Finley spent 15 years restoring homes, including blasting mold off log homes with ground-up corn cobs. Now, he uses ice pellets, a discovery that changed his whole business.
“Corn cobs did the job but made an awful mess to clean up,” said Finley, now president of West Coast Ice Blasting in Bellingham. “Older log homes accumulate a lot of mold where the finish has worn off. Ice blasting cleans them up even better than corn cobs and with nothing to sweep up afterward.”
But the process worked so well on molds that he explored other uses for it, discovering that the whole technology of ice blasting had been around for years but only recently became available for independent contractors’ use for a variety of applications.
“Ice blasting uses carbon-dioxide pellets frozen to minus-110 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s common dry ice. It’s not just the power of the stream of ice pellets from the hose nozzle that does the job. It’s the temperature differential of the ice. The thermal shock freezes surface materials instantly. It cracks and falls off, leaving minimal debris to clean up. The ice pellets simply evaporate,” he said.
The technology for cleaning surfaces with blasts of dry-ice pellets has been around for nearly two decades. Boeing uses it to clean injection moulds. Starbucks cleans its coffee-brewing equipment. Steel mills can clean equipment that’s operating at 400 degrees because the extra temperature difference increases the power of the thermal shock.
Recently, ice-blasting technology became available on a smaller scale for independent businesses. Finley researched the process, then started his business about a year ago. In recent weeks he has been visiting businesses in Snohomish County. There are a few ice-blasting contractors in California and other states, but Finley said he has found only two other firms in Washington state.
“A lot of what I do is education. Ice blasting is so new at the general contractor level that people don’t know about it,” he said. “People are curious. It only takes a sample cleaning of a section of a hard-to-clean or hard-to-reach surface before they ask me when I can start on the whole project.”
One of his earliest success stories comes from his work at Chemco, a Ferndale plant that treats wood shingles with fire-retardant chemicals. He found the company spends nearly $400,000 a year periodically cleaning the kilns and contaminated heat exchangers where shingles are dried.
“The kilns have to be shut down and sand-blasted, then the sand has to be cleaned up before they can operate again,” he said. “With ice pellets, I cleaned the kiln with no residue to clean up. They were moving shingles into the kiln at one end while I was finishing up at the other end,” he said. “The savings in the time it took them to get equipment back on line was huge.”
He buys his ice pellets by the ton from a plant in Oregon, using them at the rate of hundreds of pounds an hour. The volume of pellet use depends on what he’s cleaning. His prices depend on the circumstances of each individual job.
“With our hose nozzles we can reach areas in home attics that other mold-removal methods can’t reach. Same thing with industrial equipment, including some equipment that normally would have to be disassembled for periodic cleaning with solvents or other methods,” he said. “In fire restoration, we can even remove soot and smoke damage from book covers and the edges of the pages without damaging them.”
The process doesn’t work on some surfaces, he said, such as epoxy paints that adhere so well to surfaces that ice blasting can’t remove them.
For more information, contact West Coast Ice Blasting at 360-961-3220 or go online to www.westcoasticeblasting.com.
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