Guardian Water Treatment’s MD, Steven Booth, took to the stage at Build2Perform in Olympia, in November, alongside Steve Munn from Hevasure. The pair delivered a headlining session entitled ‘The Value of Reliability’.
During the seminar Steve Munn, an experienced research scientist and Hevasure’s MD, presented strong evidence to support the case for remote monitoring in water-based HVAC systems; highlighting the significant cost-saving potential of remote monitoring over more traditional sampling methods.
The most common cause of corrosion in closed systems is oxygen ingress, usually down to the poor design and installation of the system, inadequate pre-commissioning cleaning and insufficient on-going maintenance. Corrosion problems in closed heating and CHW systems lead to serious disruption in the system’s operation, significant losses in efficiency, damage to a company’s reputation and in most cases hefty bills to put things right.
Steve used the example of a leaking steel pipe in the CHW system at a major hospital in Northern Ireland that led to the delayed opening of a critical care unit and staggering repair costs running to around £16m. He argued that had the system been monitored using Hevasure’s remote technology such major costs and disruption could have been avoided.
He then set out the limitations of conventional system water analysis which are adopted widely throughout the UK, that they:
In contrast, Hevasure’s continual monitoring system can:
Cost-saving technology
Steven Booth focused on the real cost savings that remote monitoring can bring over the life cycle of a CHW system. These are considerable. As small deviations can be diagnosed and fixed before they get too serious, typical savings of £80-£120K can be made over a ten year operating period. Such savings ranged from the extended life of the system, a reduction in water treatment costs, energy saving costs of up to 5% and the prevention of catastrophic failure.
There are also savings to be made during pre-commission cleaning; typically, a 40% reduction on the costs of water treatment sampling. Diagnostic costs are also reduced as the fixed cost of monitoring provides a 24/7 view of system health, rather than relying on unfixed costs relating to traditional sampling and flushing tests which can be indeterminate.
The pair presented the associated costs for monitoring a large office block in London, Telephone House. Failures, leaks, flushing and sampling in the three years running up to the installation of Hevasure came to £29K. A three-month Hevasure health check, which successfully diagnosed the problem (a problem traditional sampling tests was unable to detect) cost just £4.8K. The cost of Hevasure’s ongoing monitoring over three years is £18K, representing a significant saving.
Hevasure’s sate of the art monitoring technology has revolutionised the protection of heating and chilled water systems from corrosion damage. By providing proactive rather than reactive monitoring real savings can be made when moving away from the outmoded diagnostic tests of sampling and corrosion coupons.
For more information about Hevasure, click here.