Tagged: colours

Grease colours

grease_colour

Is Grease Color important?

I’ve almost always heard my customers refer to the grease that they are using by its colour.They would say, “I’m using the blue grease.”

However, greases are not defined by their colour.

Colour is often added to grease to allow it to be easily identifiable within the field.

For instance, if a grease is coloured blue, it is easy to identify if it’s leaking or not (one way not to confuse the leak with an oil leak).

Some greases are coloured to ensure that the applicant uses it in the correct application.

For example, if a blue grease is a multipurpose grease then this ideally shouldn’t be used in the very high temperature area.

Most of the times, red greases are used for high temperature applications. Thus making it easy to identify if the correct grease is used in the right application.

However, one should note the colours of the greases being used in their facility and their applications before comparing them to that of another facility (which may be using a different grease manufacturer.)

Don’t define greases by their colours, define them by their applications!

Different colours greases

Colour Coding

What is the importance of Colour Coding?

Quite often when we are correcting or helping companies set up their lubrication storage areas, we get asked a lot of questions regarding colour coding.

Colour_coding

Ideally, the concept of colour coding is to allow field personnel to easily identify and associate particular lubricants with their applications.

However, like most things in reliability, this can be customized to suit your organization. There are no hard and fast rules of using only yellow to represent hydraulic oils.

What if we had someone that was colour blind?

Usually, when we start colour coding lubricant storage containers, we include symbols and actual names of the lubricant. This helps to assist personnel in having a 3 point verification system.

First they can verify the colour, then the symbol and of course the name of the lubricant.

Names are crucial! Especially for varying viscosities (such as gear or hydraulic oils). For instance all gear oil would have the same colour and symbol but you wouldn’t want to put an ISO 100 gear oil in a gearbox suited for ISO 680.