Even with the best will in the world it is a fact of life in the water sector that assets deteriorate over the course of their typical 20 year life-span. In addition the budgets associated with operating these assets remains under extreme pressure on the one hand, with increased demands due to external factors, population growth, increasingly extreme weather events, more and more 'interesting' types of material being flushed into the waste system by users, and that is before the implications of vandalism and theft of metals is taken into consideration. In parallel with that, over time the supply chain innovates to bring more and more efficient systems to market, albeit with the price tag that you would expect for new capital equipment
One of challenges is ensuring that equipment is in proper working order, as well as bringing these new features on-line within budget. Haigh have been developing a suite of services and products that bring existing inlet works up to scratch and have been successfully rolling out this programme over the last few years with most of the UK water authorities and their Tier 1 service partners.
Grimethorpe treatment works had suffered from vandalism rendering it virtually derelict. The initial conclusion was that they were facing a full replacement and the cost of the associated site design and new equipment, however following a survey by Haigh, an alternative was determined. This option would bring the site back up to working order and introduce a number of new control and physical features that would increase reliability, efficiency, performance and ease of maintenance. The bottom line being that the customer would get more for their money and improve the inlet process area for the foreseeable future.
With the Haigh site team delivering the improvements, the operators were given training to ensure that the new concepts were delivered. After consultation with operations personnel additional anti theft measures, including painting the equipment, security fixing and welding of fixing down bolts, were included as part of the upgrade.
The Storm Macipump units were also added to the site, at no additional cost to the standard units, delivering enhanced processing capability under storm and high load scenarios, with the service exchange option allowing this to be undertaken in the tight time scales that the customer was facing. Following on from the rapid pace of advancement in the area of system controls, an updated control system and philosophy was applied to the equipment, optimised at the commissioning stage by the team to ensure that the various flow scenarios that the equipment was now facing were taken into consideration, again a process that is now standard across new Haigh installations. As all the Haigh survey recommendations had been progressed, an extended warranty on all the affected equipment was also provided, giving the users complete peace of mind as to the quality levels of the work that had been undertaken.
The team at Grimethorpe were impressed with how the uplift had been implemented, particularly given the challenging budget that they had available, a “Great effort”. Paul Brook, Haigh's Area Sales Consultant notes: “This was only possible based on the close understanding between the parties involved and the trust between customer and client. It is great to see this programme of quality maintenance and refurbishments continuing in this area at a pace.”
