When my mill sits for more than a week or two esp in the hot summer garage my cutting fluid starts to rot and stink. What do you do to keep your cutting fluid usable and not doing a total system flush once a month during the summer. I do not use it all that often and seems a waste to half to buy a 50-60 dollar jug of fusion cool to cut one or two parts. Granted I have blown more that that on broken bits but that is a another dumb NOB story.
I am mainly cutting Aluminium and one ore two mild steel part every now and agin.
I am located in the south San Francisco bay area.
Try running an aquarium bubbler in it. The water-based fluid mostly grows blue-green algae which doesn’t like excessive oxygen.
I found on prior machines that flood coolant doesn’t work well for my occasional use. If I go weeks between jobs the coolant would either get rancid or would partially evaporate and need to be freshened up. It just wasn’t the right option for my home shop.
I run exclusively fog-buster style mist on my MR-1 and that works great for me. It keeps the machine a lot cleaner as well and I just sweep or vacuum up chips. Nothing gets sticky. A strong air blast does most of the cheap clearing, and the coolant volume is tiny, just enough to keep the cutter fresh.
I run MRR about 10-20% lower than what I could probably do with flood, but that is fine for my use cases.
I have an aquarium bubbler on a timer to run 15 minutes every hour. I also put an aquarium heater in the tank for the winter to keep it from freezing or separating.
My last tank of coolant lasted about a year and a half and it starting to get milky looking and smelling off. Going to clean the system and mix a new batch next week.