Let’s start with the basics: During the initial fill-up, it’s simple. You know the volume of your tank (e.g., 1000 liters or 264.17 gallons) and the recommended concentration for your coolant (e.g., 8% as stated in the product documentation).
For example: 8% of 1000 liters (264.17 gallons) = 1000L × 0.08 = 80L (21.13 gallons) of concentrate required for the initial fill.
In this case, you don’t need to worry about the concentration in every bucket when mixing manually or checking the mixer output. You just control the liquid level in your concentrate drum or IBC container.
But what happens next?
Coolant volume decreases over time due to several factors:
As a result, the volume of coolant in the tank decreases. But here’s the key question: Can you always top up with just 8% coolant?
The answer is no.
Coolant is a mix of concentrate (oil) and water. Evaporation primarily affects water, not the concentrate. Over time, this causes the concentration to increase as the tank’s emulsion volume decreases.
Example: Calculating a Top-Up
Therefore your task is to:
If you add coolant with an 8% concentration:
Clearly, adding coolant at 8% won’t reduce the concentration to the desired 8%.
To achieve the target concentration:
To mix the emulsion correctly for given example, your top-up should consist of: 290 liters of water and 10 liters of concentrate we calculated above. This gives a top-up concentration of 3.3%.
Manual calculations can be tedious and error-prone, especially when factoring in refractometer correction coefficients.
Our Coolant Top-Up Calculator eliminates the hassle by:
Desktop:
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