Competitive Comparison

Competitive Comparison

Pulse Cleaning

(Offered by others)

Attempts to clean 5,000 cells at once. Center cells clean first, while outside cells get little cleaning. Cleaning stops when a path of least resistance is established, typically through the center of the filter only.

PROCESS TIME: 20 MINUTES
Cleaning action is hidden
Cleans from only one end
Only cleans center cells
Cannot determine when cleaning is completed
No Diagnostic Capability

Air Knife Scanning

Cleans using Air Knife Scanning technology (patented) on both ends of the filter. Every cell is cleaned numerous times from both directions, providing visible diagnostics and cleaning process.

PROCESS TIME: 22 MINUTES
Visable Cleaning Action
Cleans from BOTH ends
Cleans all cells
Completed cleaning when particulate is clear
Diagnostic Capability

COMPARISON OF PNEUMATIC FILTER CLEANING MACHINES

CLEANING CHARACTERISTICS

PULSE A

PULSE B

FSX Cleaning Characteristics
EACH FILTER CELL IS ADDRESSED INDIVIDUALLY X X
CLEANS ON BOTH ENDS OF FILTER X X
DIAGNOSTIC CAPABILITY DETECTS FAILED CELLS X X
OPERATOR CAN SEE ENTIRE CLEANING PROCESS X X
AUTOMATIC CLEANING MODE
MANUAL OVERRIDE OF AUTOMATIC MODE FOR CUSTOM CLEANING X X
PERCENTAGE OF DUST REMOVED FROM FILTER 74% 71% 95%

DUST COLLECTION SYSTEM

PULSE A

PULSE B

FSX Cleaning Characteristics
BUILT-IN OR REMOTE BUILT-IN BULIT-IN REMOTE
NUMBER OF DPFs CLEANED BEFOREÂ PAPER FILTERS NEED CHANGING 50 12 300+
FILTER COST $190 $207 $265
DUST COLLECTION SYSTEM INCLUDED IN PRICE OF PNEUMATIC CLEANER X

ADJUSTABILITY

PULSE A

PULSE B

FSX Cleaning Characteristics
MAXIMUM & MINIMUM HEIGHT DIMENSIONS OF FILTER 20″ 20″ / 13″ 36″ / 5″
HEIGHT ADJUSTMENT AIR ACTUATED HAND CRANK ELECTRIC
MAXIMUM & MINIMUM DIAMETER OF FILTER 15″ / 8″ 15″ / 8″ 20″ & 3″
DIAMETER ADJUSTMENT CONE CONE ELECTRIC
FITS ALL MANUFACTURERS FILTERS WITHOUT CUSTOM ADAPTERS X X
CLEANS UNDER ENCROACHING INLET AND OUTLET FLANGES X X
WORKS IF FILTER PUT IN UPSIDE-DOWN X X

MECHANICAL

PULSE A

PULSE B

FSX Cleaning Characteristics
AIR REQUIREMENT 20 CFM 20CFM 120CFM
COMPRESSOR INCLUDED X X X
ELECTRICAL 120 VAC 120 VAC 120 VAC
INSTALLATION TIME 30 MINUTES 30 MINUTES 1HR
(INCL. DUST COLLECTOR)
Penske Takes DPF cleaning in-house, saving ‘millions of dollars’

Penske Takes DPF cleaning in-house, saving ‘millions of dollars’

CCJ Innovators profiles carriers and fleets that have found innovative ways to overcome trucking’s challenges. If you know a carrier that has displayed innovation, contact CCJ Editor Jason Cannon at jasoncannon@randallreilly.com or 800-633-5953.

Shortly after the turn of the new millennium, maintenance technicians were staring down a new challenge: an exhaust aftertreatment system that only after a few years would be a ubiquitous piece of equipment.

By 2006, Mike Hasinec, vice president of maintenance for Penske Truck Leasing, had begun working with vendors on diesel particulate filter (DPF) parts procurement, foreseeing that anything designed to trap matter would need to be cleaned or replaced eventually.

“The DPF is simply a filter,” Hasinec said. “Sometimes in this industry we overcomplicate things and overthink them, but at the end of the day, that’s all that DPF does is collect something just like an oil filter or a fuel filter, and it needs to be cleaned periodically or changed.”

Downtime is frustrating enough on its own, and adding wait time for a given part just heaps insult on top of injury.

“One of the things we learned is the key to success is having product on the shelf,” Hasinec said. Yet fleet maintenance personnel also have to consider the cost of carrying inventory, and DPFs are expensive.

By 2012, Penske’s DPF-related expenses began to climb, along with the inefficiencies that came from having to find a local service provider to clean it, or buying a new one, Hasinec said.

Hasinec envisioned an in-house reman program where DPFs would be exchanged during a preventive maintenance (PM) interval. A year later, Penske initiated a proof of concept to see if having DPFs on the shelf would improve productivity.

“One of the reasons our expense had gone through the roof is it became an unplanned event.” he said. “The vehicle would come in for a preventive maintenance service [and] we didn’t have a DPF on the shelf.”

Not having a DPF on-hand, Hasinec said, was largely because many OEMs, who in 2006 said they would eventually have a reman program in place, mostly never developed them.

With customers eager to get their trucks back in service, service technicians didn’t have the luxury to down the truck while waiting for a new DPF or waiting for the one we removed to be cleaned. This practice led to “some fairly high failure rates,” Hasinec said, “because we weren’t replacing them when we should have.”

A beta test took place in the shadows of Penske’s headquarters in Reading, Pennsylvania, and included 20 facilities where management personally delivered cleaned DPFs to Penske shops according to their PM schedules. The group hit an execution rate of 85% and moved the exchange program forward a year later, now cleaning their own DPFs for the entire Northeast region.

“We had to buy a bunch of brand new DPFs to seed the program, but as we started getting dirty filters in, we learned very quickly that every filter had unique cleaning needs,” Hasinec said.

Penske cleaning goes proprietary

The time it takes to clean a DPF can vary depending on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s compliance level of the engine, but one unit usually can be blown clean within 10 to 30 minutes if the filter doesn’t need to be baked or undergo an ultrasonic aqueous treatment. The baking process takes about 12 hours. A cleaning that requires all three stages could take a day and a half.

Penske purchased the necessary equipment and refined the manner in which the DPF is cleaned, including developing its own aqueous process. Penske identified and follows a proprietary and unique cleaning pattern with nozzles, pressures and distances.


Cleaning a DPF restores some measure of capacity into the filter by removing baked-on particles. However, Hasinec learned that process can be an inexact science with varying degrees of effectiveness across multiple vendors. Working with suppliers, Penske determined available cleaning methods were getting a return capacity of between 20% and 60%.

The wide spread in cleanliness, Hasinec said, often can be tied back to the person in charge of the process — all too often a technician who hasn’t been trained properly on the equipment, and the fact that the cleaning process is not their primary job, it’s just something they do in between other jobs.

“The technician may be doing a brake job, and his boss says ‘Hey, I’ve got 20 DPFs that need cleaning today,’ ” he said.

Penske’s goal is to clean a DPF only once during the vehicle’s six- to seven-year lifecycle, with scheduled exchange intervals based on a variety of attributes. Using maintenance data generated by the trucks deployed across its vast network, Penske is able to predict with a high degree of accuracy when the DPF needs to be exchanged.

“The key is taking it off soon enough,” Hasinec said, “but not too soon.”

Penske blow-cleans all its dirty DPFs. If that doesn’t deliver a return capacity of at least 85%, it will move to a baking process before being reblown. Particularly clogged DPFs get an aqueous solution bath before being baked and then blown.

“Depending on the engine, we see a high success rate with purely blowing them out,” Hasinec said. “Our failure rate once it goes through aqueous is almost nonexistent. Aqueous will clean almost anything.”

Cleaning centers create ‘resident experts’

The demonstration across the Northeast showed a savings of between $300 and $500 per unit, which totaled “millions of dollars” Hasinec said, when factoring for the size of Penske’s fleet.

In 2016, the company opened full-time DPF cleaning centers across North America and solved the issue of having busy maintenance technicians clean DPFs by staffing the facilities with employees whose sole job is to receive, clean and ship the units.

“That’s all they do all day long,” Hasinec said. “They are truly resident experts.”

Penske cleaned 34,000 DPFs last year with an average 90% return to capacity — more than 30% better than the best of what the company found on the aftermarket.

The company has three cleaning centers in the United States, opened its first DPF Center in Canada this year, and expects to have cleaned more than 120,000 units by June across its four centers since the inception of doing this in- house. Reading, the largest facility, did about 15,000 cleanings in 2019, Kansas City around 11,000 and another in Reno, Nevada, about 8,000. Expectation for Canada is fairly small, but the new location is expected to clean “a few thousand a year,” Hasinec said. The Reading facility can clean, ship and receive 60 units per day.

Penske manages the inventory at each site and can ship a cleaned DPF to any of its 750-plus shops in two days.

“Every morning when our centers open up, they know what locations need which part number,” Hasinec said. “We know what they consume, so they don’t even have to call. All they have to do is put it on and ship the dirty one back to us.”

Read the Penske FSX testimonial here

FSX Releases TrapBlaster JR solution for small and medium size shops to support DPF cleaning

FSX Releases TrapBlaster JR solution for small and medium size shops to support DPF cleaning

We are excited to officially announce the TrapBlaster JR, the newest DPF cleaning machine in the FSX family.

For years, FSX customers have been asking for a solution for small and medium size shops who want to get into DPF cleaning.

The standard FSX DPF Cleaning Package is designed for high volume shops. It requires a large air compressor, plenty of 3 phase power, 18’ of floor space and can be quite costly for the small shops.

After two years of development and testing, we now have a solution for small shops. The new TrapBlaster JR uses much less air, runs on single phase, takes up less floor space and comes with a price tag that small shops can afford.

The TrapBlaster JR has an integrated dust collector so there is no need for a SootSucker. The best part is the TrapBlaster JR can run on shop air as little as a 10HP compressor! Small shops are no longer faced with finding power and space for a 30HP dedicated compressor!

The only drawback is that it is unable to clean the medium duty International DPFs (DuraStar/TerraStar) that have welded cones on both ends. We believe this represents a small percentage of the overall DPF cleaning business.

We recommend that customers also purchase the TrapTester and TrapBurner to complete the cleaning and testing capabilities.

The TrapTester and TrapBurner are now available in single phase so shops that do not have 3 phase power can get into the DPF cleaning business.

We believe this new machine will fit well with smaller shops that would like to penetrate the DPF cleaning market but haven’t had the resources to fund it until now.

General Truck Supplies Becomes First North American FSX CatBlaster Pneumatic & Hydro DPF Cleaning Location

General Truck Supplies Becomes First North American FSX CatBlaster Pneumatic & Hydro DPF Cleaning Location

General Truck Supplies, Wilmington California, is the first North American FSX CatBlaster (now called Light-Duty DPF Cleaning System) Pneumatic and Hydro DPF (diesel particulate filter) cleaning facility as designated and authorized by FSX Equipment, Granite Falls Washington. General Truck Supplies is independently owned for over 20 years and specialize in heavy duty commercial truck parts and DPF maintenance services. With FSX’s CatBlaster Pneumatic and Hydro DPF equipment, General Truck Supplies is now able to clean light duty DPF equipment on vehicles like Dodge and Mercedes Benz Sprinters and many other diesel automobiles. General Truck Supplies has been a trusted leader in heavy duty DPF cleaning while utilizing FSX’s DPF cleaning equipment for years. FSX Equipment continues to dominate the nationwide DPF cleaning equipment market and has chosen General Truck Supplies to be its first USA/Canada CatBlaster location.

General Truck Supplies has hundreds of loyal customers in and surrounding the Port of Long Beach and Port of Los Angeles. General Truck Supplies’ recent designation by FSX Equipment to be the first CatBlaster Pneumatic and Hydro DPF cleaning equipment location in the United States instantly expands the company’s reach throughout all of Southern California and further solidifies its DPF cleaning leadership and commitment to providing superior service.

General Truck Supplies’ co-owner Paul Varela credits his company’s DPF cleaning success to his shop’s exceptionally skilled DPF technicians, the use of FSX’s state of the art DPF cleaning equipment and the accompanying software needed to track the cleaning process (FSX TrapTracker). With FSX’s CatBlaster Pneumatic and Hydro equipment, General Truck Supplies will get busier.

“The combination of FSX Inc.’s high quality DPF cleaning equipment, the FSX TrapTracker software, the FSX CatBlaster, all of these make a great combination with our team. These leading edge FSX technologies increase our capacity to now clean and service light duty DPF units” Mr. Varela confidently stated.

FSX Releases CatBlaster 2 as the newest DPF cleaning system in the FSX family

FSX Releases CatBlaster 2 as the newest DPF cleaning system in the FSX family

FSX Equipment, Inc, is proud to officially announce the CatBlaster 2 (now called Light-Duty DPF Cleaning System) as the newest DPF cleaning system in the FSX family. The CatBlaster is designed for the light duty and automotive diesel particulate filter cleaning market. Light duty diesel trucks from GM, Dodge, and Ford, as well as Sprinter vans and diesel cars, have enclosed DPFs that require a customized cleaning approach. These filters were not designed by the manufacturer to be cleaned and do not have disconnect flanges to gain access to the surface of the filter for cleaning.

After four years of testing and development, the CatBlaster meets the challenge of cleaning these difficult DPFs and DOCs. The first cleaning step is the CatBlaster 2P. It knocks out most of the ash and soot with bi-directional pneumatic cleaning while preserving the bypass diagnostic feature that FSX machines are famous for. All other light duty cleaning methods use water first. Water cleaning eliminates the ability to detect bypass through the filter which identifies internally failed DPF cores. Since our inception, FSX machines have always had a diagnostic feature to be able to visually identify failed DPFs within seconds. The CatBlaster 2P is no different. It has an inspection window that will reveal broken DPFs in under a minute.

Another reason we don’t use water first is it is much easier to remove soot and ash when the DPFs is dry and it allows for easy waste disposal. After the majority of the soot and ash is removed using the CatBlaster 2P (about 10 minutes), the DPF is flushed with water in the CatBlaster 2H. This process removes the remaining material in just 5 minutes and then goes into drying the filter for 25 minutes. The entire process takes about 45 minutes and will also flow check the filter before and after leaving the operator with a printed ticket showing the results.

FSX invented a superior way to filter the waste water that features easy-to-clean reusable and inexpensive filters. The operator does not have to scoop out the sludge from a holding tank or purchase high price cartridge filters.