Water Safety

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.

Updated Medical Device Processing Requirements  The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) introduced a new standard, ANSI/AAMI ST108:2023, establishing requirements for the quality of water used to process medical devices. The ST108 standard, which replaces AAMI TIR34, reflects an industry-wide commitment to ensuring that medical devices, instruments, and equipment meet stringent hygiene and quality…

Boilers are a necessary part of many establishments and can be found anywhere hot water or steam is required. Most facilities, from the ones that produce food to hospitals, require uninterrupted use of boilers everyday.
Proper treatment is important for maintaining maximum steam production and avoiding unnecessary offline time. It is well known that boiler water creates deposits on the interior surface of the machine. Deposits may vary from scale due to concentrated minerals to those created by corrosion products.This leads to problems ranging from loss of efficiency to condemning a boiler, especially in the low to medium pressure boilers.

With the global pandemic and variants of viruses being spread via aerosolized and aspirated droplets, water safety is more critical now than at any other time in our global history. Waterborne pathogens found in water systems include building sprinklers, water features, fountains, and delivery pipes. Anywhere water is stored, left to sit, or is used intermittently, or held in pipes is subject to the creation of biofilms. These hard-to-remove biofilms allow the bacteria to grow and multiply in a protected shell until eventually released and is aerosolized through various point-of-use devices.

The efficiency of cooling towers is always a topic of discussion and worth a deeper dive. Even a well-controlled scale or corrosion inhibitor program can be significantly affected by the presence of flourishing microorganisms. Because the interior of a cooling tower is usually moist and warm, it provides an ideal condition for microorganisms to flourish and they subsequently migrate throughout the entire cooling system.

Fresh tap water teems with harmless life, but when water sits inside pipes for an extended period, even for just a few days, more sinister bacterial growth can occur. In fact, when a family leaves home for a week’s vacation, harmful bacteria can grow easily and multiply in static plumbing and water faucets, gathering inside Biofilms — toxic bacterial masses where microbes colonize together in a self-protective layer of communal slime.