Cimex Maintenance: Replacing the Belt, Waterfeed Elbow, and Cleaning the Plumbing
How to Provide Basic Maintenance on Your Cimex Machine
Here are a couple of videos that show how to provide basic service for the Cime machine. Cimex machines are stout machines that will provide years of heavy usage. However, there are a couple of maintenance tricks you should be aware of.
Cleaning out the Cimex plumbing
The first item to be aware of is the need to keep the Cimex plumbing clean. The Cimex is a gravity feed system. The cleaning solution runs from the tank, through the blue "bowl", and down through the pad drivers or brushes. It's important to keep the plumbing clean in order to keep the solution flowing freely to all 3 heads. Mineral build-up and coagulated detergent can lead to compromised flow. So cleaning the Cimex plumbing should be a routine maintenance step. We recommend cleaning the plumbing at least once a month. It only takes a few minutes and it will greatly improve the performance of your encap cleaning. Here's a short video that shows how to keep the Cimex plumbing clean.
Relacing the Cimex Belt
Over time the Cimex belt will gradually begin to stretch. We're talking about after hundreds of hours and many many thousands of square feet of carpet cleaning. What you'll notice as your belt begins to get tired is that the pads don't start up spinning right away when you get going - you'll notice some slippage. That's your indicator that you'll want to plan on replacing the belt soon. Replacing the Cimex belt is not difficult. This video will show you how.
Replacing the Cimex Water Feed Elbow
On the older Cimex machines, the water-feed elbow has made of plastic. The plastic stem that protrudes from the back of the machine could get bumped and then the elbow would break. Newer Cimex machines now have a brass elbow which is great because they're essentially bullet-proof. But if you have an older Cimex machine with a broken waterfeed elbow this video will show you how to replace it. This repair is a bit more involved, but it can be performed fairly easily if you are mechanically inclined.
Here are links to the Cimex Belt for the CR48 and for the brass Water Feed Elbow.