What BioTech makes
Two products, one program, and nothing that steers you toward a coolant.
BioTech International has built rapid biological testers and a non-biocidal coolant stabilizer out of Needville, Texas since 1986. Everything below is either the HMB X instrument, the Mark II Stabilizer, or the Zero Waste program that runs the two of them together. There is a fourth entry here too, the other places the same tester gets used outside a machine shop.
One thing on purpose is missing from this list. BioTech does not sell coolant, and does not make skimmers. Both are things we could plausibly sell and do not, which is why the advice on which fluid to run, or what to buy for tramp oil, is worth listening to.
What holds a sump steady once you know what is in it
The additive and the program built around it.
A non-biocidal additive. It does not kill anything, so nothing crashes and nothing blooms back. Population falls away slowly, by attrition, and recovers just as slowly.
A biocide is consumed doing its job, and once its concentration drops below the effective line you get a bloom, a fast burst of regrowth, with a redose window measured in hours. Stabilizer just stops reproduction, so the curve is a shallow sine wave instead of a sawtooth, and the redose window is measured in days.
Read the full pageTesting, filtering, tramp oil removal, and the stabilizer, run together around whatever coolant is already in your sumps. Some shops on the full program have not disposed of a fluid load in over ten years.
Filters pull the solid particles, the dirt and fine metal that wreck coolant performance and give microbes somewhere to live. Tramp oil is the honest gap: our filters do not remove it, skimming needs top-of-sump access a lot of machines do not have, and where that is the case we will point you at someone else's skimmer rather than pretend ours does the job.
Read the full pageNot just a machine shop instrument
Beyond metalworking
The same fifteen-minute reading, applied anywhere a fluid or a solid can carry a biological load: cooling towers, waste treatment, aluminum can plants, soil under bioremediation, and unidentified powders for first responders.
Biofilm in a cooling tower is the principal facilitator of Legionella growth, and it usually goes unnoticed until it has already fouled a heat exchanger. A real-time reading catches it building, rather than confirming it after the fact.
Tell us what's in the sump.
Describe the fluid, the machines, and what has gone wrong, and we will tell you honestly whether it is a testing question, a stabilizer question, or something we do not make at all.