Calves with Sam

 Checking Concentrations of Disinfectants

The effectiveness of a disinfectant is partially determined by the concentration of the active ingredient. Using too little product sets us up for failure - we think we have done the right thing but by failing to use enough product we have essentially wasted our time. 

Using too much product set us up for inefficient disinfection. We spent too much money to achieve our goal of reducing pathogen populations. Just for review you may want to go to Disinfection 101 at this site http://www.cfsph.iastate.edu/Disinfection/Assets/Disinfection101.pdf  or click HERE.

One of my clients with a calf barn was using chlorine dioxide for disinfecting calf pens. I raised the question about the concentration being used. They intended to use 200ppm. I had a canister of test strips in the truck. The solution tested between 10 and 25ppm rather than 200ppm (it's a color strip so an exact value is not possible - Insta-Test by LaMotte).

So, they were doing a lot of work to accomplish very little. Now they check the solution every time before using it to see that all that spraying is likely to knock down the resident pathogen population