Why Is Clean Steam Better?
Whether you are using plant steam direct from your facility or a electric generator hooked up to the facilities water supply, there is no way of knowing the impurities that the steam has picked up.
Impurities can affect the items that you are sterilizing.
If you are sterilizing instruments, these impurities can start to build up on the instruments. Clean steam can significantly reduce repair and replacement costs while enhancing instrument performance and appearance.
If you are using the sterilizer to clean media, these impurities can gather and look like part of your research under a microscope, giving you an incorrect count.
Clean Steam can lengthen the life of your sterilizer and reduce maintenance times.
If the chamber walls are not experiencing any deposit build up, this means that a 20 year old chamber will be as pristine as the day it was installed, This also means no more weekly cleanings or biannual bead blasting.
It can affect the effectiveness of the sterilization process.
To insure the complete lethality of the steaming process, the steam must be saturated, having a steam quality of 97 to 100 percent. To ensure proper sterilization, the steam must be within appropriate content limits of certain contaminants.
Also, while chambers can be cleaned, jackets cannot. This means that throughout the life of a traditional sterilizer, build-up is accumulating in the jacket, resulting in cold spots and impeded heat transfer, which can obviously impact a sterilizer's ability to dry the load. Inadequate drying results in longer cycle times.
Typical limiting values of contaminants of steam and/or water in contact with product and/or product packaging
Evaporated Residue |
15 milligrams/liter |
| Silica | 2mg/L |
| Iron | 0.2mg/L |
| Cadmium | 0.005 mg/L |
| Lead | 0.05 mg/L |
| Rest of Heavy Metals | 0.1 mg/L |
| Chloride | 3 mg/L |
| Phosphate | 0.5 mg/L |
| Conductivity | 50 microseism/centimeter |
| PH | 5.5 to 8 |
| Appearance | colorless, clean, with out sediment |
| Hardness | 0.1 mmol/L |
**The above information was taken from the medical construction & design January/February 2007 and table reproduced from table a.1 of iso 13683
Sterilco's Commitment to Clean Steam
Sterilco's Sterilizer come standard with the following features:
- 316L Stainless Steel Jacket
- 316 Stainless Steel Chamber
- Stainless Steel Piping
- All of our Generators, (when ordered) Are Clean Steam Generators