Blast Abrasive Consumption: Am I Using Too Much?

This morning, driving to work, your car burned fuel. Nothing about that struck you as a problem.

A blaster (or a peener) running consumes media while operating.

For a lot of people, that still doesn't feel normal; indeed it is — consumption is correct, and consuming the right quantity is a must to get an efficient process.

It's the same thing. In one case the tool doing the work is the abrasive, and it wears out doing it. In the other, fuel burns to produce the energy that moves the vehicle. Different mechanism, same fact: for either machine to work, something has to be consumed.

Which settles what you should be aiming at. You don't expect the car to move without burning fuel, and you can't expect the blaster to work without consuming media. Zero isn't a target here — zero consumption means no work done. What you're after is not the smallest number. It's the right one.

How much is the right amount is what the rest of this page is about.

Abrasive consumption as an efficiency KPI.

Efficiency is a ratio between two numbers. So when the car seems to be burning more than it used to, the first thing to do is get hold of those two numbers and look at the ratio.

But at first, all you have is the feeling.

Then you measure it, and it costs nothing. Fill the tank, note the odometer. Drive. Next fill-up, look again. Do it a couple of times and you know whether the feeling was real or whether something else was bothering you.

One condition: same use. If you've been driving harder, or towing something, consumption goes up and it's supposed to. That's not a fault, that's the job you asked for.

Now take that whole reflex — the feeling, the check, the comparison against what it should be — and look for it in an industrial blasting operation. It isn't there.

Not because anyone is careless. Because abrasive costs can become significant without ever becoming visible: sitting in the middle of every other OPEX line, never large enough to stand out, never obviously wrong. Nothing raises its hand. The car at least tells you its mileage. A shot blasting machine tells you its blasting hours, and it is time to use that value.

Where the alert comes from: a rising abrasive bill.

Your own car, you know. You feel a change in it early, because you're the one driving.

The other car is different. You glance at the statement one month and your wife is spending noticeably more on fuel than she used to. She isn't doing anything wrong — the tank hits reserve, she fills it, she goes. Nobody asked her to track it, and there's no reason she would.

So you ask the only useful question first: has the car been used differently? Longer trips, more of them, something loaded in the back. If the answer is no, and nothing strange turns up, you end up saying — fine, I'll take it this week, I want to see what's going on. And then you do exactly what you'd do with your own: note the odometer, watch the tank, work out what it's actually consuming.

Industry gets there the same way. Nobody on the floor feels it. What happens is a note from the white-collar side: we're at forty grand of abrasive this year and we closed last year at half that. Or: we're already at ninety percent of last year's spend and it's July.

That's the first input. It's a good one — it's the statement doing its job.

And it's also where most of these stories go wrong, because the note arrives in the currency of a cost line, so the analysis starts in that currency too.

Efficiency is a ratio between blasting hours and kilograms of media used.

Measuring a car in money tells you nothing. Fuel prices move, your driving may vary. Unless you're the one reconciling the accounts, the statement isn't the instrument — litres and kilometres are (or miles/gallons).

Same here, and if you're reading this you're probably a production engineer rather than a controller. So start with the things that count: kilograms of abrasive purchased over the year, and what the plant actually put out in the same period.

Then compare the two movements, not the two invoices. If output grew thirty or forty percent last year, abrasive consumption growing by something in that range is not a finding. That's the machine doing more work, and it's the industrial version of towing something.

What deserves a closer look is the other case: kilograms clearly up, output flat or nearly, and the price per kilo barely moved — so the spend didn't come from the market and it didn't come from volume.

That's the rough pass, and it only tells you whether to bother. The real ratio is kilograms against wheel-hours, and that one you have to go and measure.

How to measure your abrasive consumption per wheel-hour.

Say the numbers come back and the car is burning fifty, seventy, a hundred percent more than it should. Two options. Spend the weekend in the garage, if you have the time to go looking and attempt to figure out why. Or hand it to a mechanic.

Either way the numbers did what numbers do: they told you something changed. They didn't tell you what, and they didn't tell you how to fix it.

So put yourself in the same position with the blaster that you're in with the car: a figure of your own, measured over a real window, against a reference of what it should be.

Go and measure. Almost every wheel blast machine — CM certainly — has an hour counter that only advances while the wheels are actually running. Loading, unloading, waiting, none of it counts. Just blasting time. And on an older unit, you can make sure the counter is actually working.

Take a window of three or four weeks. Not shorter: too narrow and the abrasive used won't line up with the hours the machine actually ran, and you'll be doing arithmetic on noise.

Note the counter at the start. Note it at the end. Put the media used in that period against the hours gained, and you have your consumption of the blaster per hour. Divide that by the number of wheels the machine has installed, and you've got your figure — the one that compares against everything below.

A post-it does it. Somebody in production who's at the machine anyway does it. Or Vortex does it, which is the same post-it that stopped needing you to remember.

The reference: steel shot and grit consumption per wheel-hour.

With a car you have two things to compare against. Your own history — what it used to do — and whatever the internet says the average is for that model. Neither is hard to find.

Blasting machines don't work like that, unless someone took the data — Vortex will, if you adopt it. There's no published figure for your machine doing your parts, and if anyone is collecting data, they aren't sharing it.

What we can do is something much more general, enough to tell you whether your numbers are in the right country.

First question: which abrasive are you running?

I'm assuming steel, because it's by far the most common. There are plenty of others — different alloys, different materials entirely — and they behave differently. Steel, in its two main shapes: shot, spherical, and grit, angular. If you're running anything else, the only thing this page can usefully tell you is to book a call.

Shot. For a process running steel shot, count roughly one kilogram per wheel, per hour of blasting — two pounds per wheel-hour in imperial.

That's a deliberately generic number. It won't survive being multiplied by anything, and it isn't meant to. Its whole job is to tell you which side of the line you're on.

Around that figure, things are usually running more or less as they should. Beyond it, you've got something worth checking.

And the checking is where the generic figure ends. To go further you have to get into the process itself — starting with the installed power of the wheels, because a number that means "fine" on one machine means something else entirely on another. From there you can get precise.

Grit. Giving a reference for grit is harder still, and I'd rather say so than invent one.

Steel shot wears by getting smaller. A rounder, lighter particle still does the same kind of work, just with less energy behind it — the mechanism is intact, the energy is falling off.

Grit works on energy and shape: the angular edge is what does the cutting, and once a particle has rounded off it's finished as grit, whatever it still weighs. It gets replaced because it ran out of geometry, not because it ran out of energy. That moves with grit type, hardness, substrate and machine condition, and the typical jobs grit is used for move with it too.

What's certain is that consumption is much higher than with shot. Stretching it a little: around three kilograms per wheel-hour. That's as far as the number goes.

What this consumption figure can and can't tell you.

Sitting well outside it tells you something, and it tells you roughly how much: the further out, the more likely a review pays for itself. That's a gradient, not a threshold.

And it matters which way you're out, because both directions cost money — just to different suppliers.

Far above. Waste, and low efficiency. Kilograms are going through the machine without doing work, and that's money paid to whoever sells you the abrasive.

Far below. Consuming too little sounds like good news and isn't. It usually means the dust is staying inside the machine instead of leaving it, and dust in circulation shortens the life of every wear part it touches. The money doesn't disappear, it moves: you pay it in spares, in consumable parts, and in maintenance that has to be carried out.

And if you're shot peening, this is the serious one. Too little media in circulation means you are not peening the way the spec says you are — intensity short, coverage probably short with it. That isn't a cost problem, it's a compliance problem: parts leaving your shop without the residual stress they were specified to have. Nothing downstream will catch it either, because a properly peened part and an under-peened one look exactly the same.

Sitting inside the range tells you nothing. It isn't a clearance. It means this particular figure has no signal for you — which is not the same as your process being fine. Plenty of things that cost you money don't show up in kilograms per wheel-hour at all.

So if something feels off and the number doesn't back you up, that's not a reason to drop it. The call costs nothing. If you have the sense that something isn't working, we do well to talk about it — with or without a number that agrees with you.

Five and a half tons, then seven hundred kilos.

I've seen a plant go from five and a half tons of abrasive a year to seven hundred kilograms.

That's not a saving, that's a different machine. At around ten euros a kilo delivered, it's fifty-five thousand euros a year becoming seven. And note what that means: for years, forty-eight thousand euros of that line existed for no reason at all — nobody was buying anything with it.

Two things are true at once here. Against the total numbers of an industrial plant, fifty-five thousand a year is not devastating; it's exactly the kind of figure that sits in the middle of an OPEX sheet without ever standing out. And it was still eight times what the process needed. Both facts held simultaneously for years, which is precisely why nothing happened.

So the interesting case is never a big bill. It's a bill several times larger than it needs to be, sitting there for years without ever looking wrong.

What causes a gap like that? The general condition of the machine. The condition of the process. The filter not providing good suction to the separator. The way the machine is set.

It's very hard to give an answer that covers all of it, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise — anyone who tells you which one it is without seeing the machine is selling something. There's no single road out.

The benchmark tells you the problem exists. The analysis tells you what it is and whether it's worth fixing. Those are two different jobs, and only the first one can be done from a distance.

What to do now.

Everything written up to this point is general; the solution is particular, unique to yours, and it starts with your numbers.

Tonight, in ten minutes. Write down what process you're running — the parts, and what the finish has to be. What machine, and how it's loaded. Installed power, and how many wheels. What abrasive, with the datasheet if you can get hold of it. That's the half of it that doesn't need waiting.

Over the next three or four weeks. The counter and the kilograms. A post-it on the machine, or Vortex, which does the remembering for you and hands you the figure at the end.

Book the call now, four weeks out. Don't wait until you have the number. The waiting is the measuring — put the call in the calendar today, start the post-it tomorrow, and arrive with the figure in hand.

If it turns out you're inside the range, the call is still worth having. And if you're well outside it, you'll be glad it was already booked.

Book the call

Blasting/Peening materials overview page.

Table of contents:

A) Surface treatment technologies compared.

B) Blasting Process Drifting? It’s the Setup.

C) Abrasive Consumption issues. this post

D) Is your Blasting Station a Black Hole? Process aging issue.

Silvio, Jan 7th, 2026, reviewed Jul 30th, 2026

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