The Stockpile · Pile 01 — The Services
Every machine in your plant complains when it’s failing. Magnets don’t. We put a certified number on every separator you own — and keep the receipts.
Somewhere in your plant there’s a magnet with one job: catch tramp metal before it reaches a crusher, a screen, or a customer. Plate magnets in chutes, grates in hoppers, tubes in bins, suspended magnets over belts, traps in liquid lines. And here’s the inconvenient thing about all of them — a magnet has no moving parts, no gauges, and no opinion. It will not tell you it’s weakening. It just catches a little less every year, and the first place that shows up is in your product.
Magnet pull testing ends the guessing. We come out, test every separator in the building, and hand you a documented answer to the question your auditor is eventually going to ask: how do you know your magnets still work?
And because that answer is only as good as the person and the gear behind it: our testing is performed by certified magnet auditors, on NIST-certified pull-test scales and gauss meters, by HACCP-certified staff. When the paperwork lands on an auditor’s desk, it holds.
A pull test is beautifully simple: measure the force it takes to pull a standardized steel test piece straight off the face of the magnet. The number is easy. Getting a number that means the same thing next year — that’s the craft:
While the scale is out, the auditor is also looking at things a scale can’t read — cracked or swollen tubes, worn faces, compromised housings, how much metal the magnet was holding when we opened it up. Half the value of a magnet audit is a trained set of eyes on hardware nobody has looked at since it was installed.
Left in peace, a permanent magnet gives up about 1% of its strength per century. Your plant is not peaceful. This is what actually does the damage:
| Cause | What happens | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Heat | Past its rated temperature, magnetic material lets go and never comes back — standard rare-earth starts giving up around 176°F, ceramic around 400°F. Hot product, dryers and steam cleaning all count. | Match the magnet material to the real process temperature — and test anything that’s run hot. |
| Impact | The material inside that stainless tube is brittle. Mallet cleanings, drops and pry bars fracture it where nobody can see. | Treat grates and tubes like instruments. Test after any hard hit. |
| Welding nearby | Hot work on or near a separator pushes heat and stray current through the one component that can’t take either. | Pull or shield magnets before welding — then verify with a test, not a hunch. |
| Moisture | A cracked or worn housing lets water at the magnet material, and oxidation quietly eats strength from the inside. | Housing inspection at every test; a compromised unit gets replaced, not resealed. |
| Saturation | Not damage — but a face already plated with tramp metal holds new metal weakly, and pieces wipe right back into the product. | Set cleaning frequency from what each test actually finds on the face, not from habit. |
Once a year is the food-safety floor. Every six months is the norm for separators guarding critical equipment or sitting at a critical control point. And any magnet that’s taken real heat, a hard hit, or nearby welding has earned a test now, not at the next scheduled visit. The right schedule for your plant depends on what your magnets live through and what a miss costs you — which is a ten-minute conversation, and the first baseline is where it starts.
Certified magnet auditors — our own people, trained and certified on separator auditing, carrying NIST-certified pull-test scales and gauss meters. The staff handling your food-safety documentation are HACCP certified. This isn’t a helper with a fish scale.
No, and a good program uses both. A gauss meter measures field intensity — the number that specifies and validates a magnet’s design, and the one some food-safety schemes ask for. A pull test measures real holding force on real steel — the simple, repeatable way to trend the same magnet against its own baseline for years. We carry certified instruments for both, and use each where it belongs.
Looking fine is the only thing a dead magnet still does well. The material lives sealed inside a stainless housing — heat damage, fractures and corrosion are all invisible from the outside. The only way to know is to measure.
It gets flagged in the report with the numbers behind the call, and if you want one, we’ll quote a correctly specified replacement — matched to your temperature, flow and metal-control target — through our parts line. The test result comes with no strings on it.
Applied Conveyor Technology — bulk material handling experts. Dust control, conveyor services, silo cleaning, parts, and engineering.
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