Robot cleaning: two or three times a day?
The complete cleaning process for the Lely Astronaut® milking robot only takes 15 minutes. With such a short cleaning time, there is not a great deal to be gained in terms of extra output when the system will be cleaned only twice a day. However, you will save some energy for heating up water as well as reducing detergent consumption.
Although regulations in most countries require cleaning 3 times a day as well as change of milk filters, several farmers have decided to clean their robot only two times a day and to change the filter only two times a day as well. Based on a theoretical approach that takes the growth of bacteria as a reference, the cleaning could be done every 10 hours, but then again that would not be a practical routine. According to research conducted within the EU-project for automatic milking (http://www.automaticmilking.nl/ -Deliverable D17) this does not always cause problems. The difference in milk quality as compared to farms with a three times a day cleaning frequency is significant, but still below the penalty level of 100,000.
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