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.
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.