Thunder Bay, Ontario, Great White North | To answer a couple questions;The system shuts both robots down every 8 hours and washes both the milking units and lines to the tank, much like a conventional system. It is fully automatic, we only need to change filters at some time between washes. After each cow the cups that attach to the cow are rinsed, and if a treated cow is in the herd her milk is diverted and the individual robot does a full rinse, about five minutes, after she is done before milking the next cow. The robots check the color of the milk, conductivity and temperature and will flag a cow if her milk is suspect. It does a pretty good job, at least as good as the guy I had in the parlor before. I have the robots set to dump any suspect mastitis or bloody milk. The system works well, with my average cow being milked 3.5 times/day we are seeing less mastitis not counting the dry cow issues I mentioned in an earlier post. If a robot has a cow have a failed milking 3 times in a row it shuts down and calls my cell phone. Now that the 'new machine' bugs out of it calls are pretty rare, maybe one a month or six weeks. We do a service on the units every three months and change a bunch of wear parts and calibrate pulsators, ect. Other than that they never shut off except 20 min three times a day to wash. I spend a total of about 2 minutes per day rinsing them off and cleaning the laser glass, that's it. Many days I leave the barn at 4pm, clean stalls for 15 minutes at 11 or 12pm and then back at 8 or 9am or whenever. They could run for days without any intervention - just stall cleaning, filter changes and unloading TMR at the manger. We still of course have all the cow issues to deal with but the milking part of the operation works the smoothest when the cows are left to do their own thing without us bothering them.Currently milking 115, barn has 120 stalls, I think we could handle maybe 130-135 and things would still work ok, there is always cows milking and eating 24 hours a day so overpopulation by 10% would be ok.
Edited by Bernie nw ON 12/12/2012 20:40
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Robot Barn pics
