Expert Perspectives & Industry News Driving Water Treatment Innovation
Let’s consider how business operations impact groundwater. Water is essential to the processes that drive industry. It’s a precious resource that’s tightly regulated. Water is also corrosive to pipes, equipment, and vessels that contain it. After proper treatment, wastewater eventually flows back into municipal water systems, including groundwater storage.
According to the American Hospital Association, about 36.3 million people are admitted to U.S. hospitals each year. We don’t typically think a lot about the availability of a resource as basic as water in medical institutions. But when there is a natural disaster or an unexpected man-made event, the dedicated staff of these institutions have it top of mind. Most hospitals keep back-up generators to handle the power outages usually caused by hurricanes. They don’t necessarily maintain an alternative water supply in case a water main suddenly breaks, or the power outage from a hurricane lasts longer than their generator capacity.
Challenges A college in Texas operates on an annual budget, and the purchasing policy is to award service contracts to the lowest bidder. One year that meant that Garratt-Callahan, the incumbent water treatment provider, lost the contract to a low-ball bid from a rival contractor. But at the college’s next yearly budget review, it was…
Challenge As a result of poor service and neglect from a series of water treatment providers, a healthcare center in the southwest had some serious equipment problems. Chillers were so heavily scaled that heat transfer was very inefficient and energy costs were spiking. Boilers were laden with iron deposits. All cooling towers had such massive scale deposits that…
Challenges To limit handling and liability issues, a medical center in the Midwest required hands-free delivery of its water treatment chemicals. But this requirement limited its product options and made it “captive” to a single supplier. The hospital’s water treatment capabilities were sometimes threatened as it waited weeks for overdue chemical deliveries. Approach An ROI…
I. Challenges A large municipal water reclamation plant on the Central California Coast that runs 3 RO trains had to switch to a low-cost, low-actives supplier due to a city-mandated bid process. After six weeks of working with the new supplier, the water plant experienced the following: If the situation continued, it would have resulted…
I. Challenges A high-volume beverage plant in Puerto Rico was processing well water at 85% recovery. The plant was performing monthly chemical cleanings and needed to replace the system’s 78 membrane elements every year. As a result: II. Approach Garratt-Callahan’s water treatment professionals began to troubleshoot the system. They uncovered a faulty check-valve that allowed…
I. Challenges A Midwest ethanol manufacturing plant replaced the membranes of their large reverse osmosis (RO) system but the differential pressures increased rapidly and exceeded the recommended operating ranges. If failure occurs, they will lose $200,000 in revenues per non-operational day. To cope with the problem, the ethanol plant carried out a Clean-In-Place (CIP) procedure…
I. Challenges Commercial facilities such as hotels, restaurants, bakeries, butcher shops, hospitals, and prisons often suffer from the following problems: Like many hospitality-related properties, this high-rise casino resort had many of the same challenges. They were experiencing problematic drain lines and grease traps. As a result, they were: II. Approach Garratt-Callahan’s team introduced Formula BZ…