Are you running your water treatment plant as efficiently as you could be?

Supplementary Components are designed to work with most types of instrumentation

When you’re working in the water and waste water industry, the last thing that you want is for your water treatment plant to have performance issues like build-up, inaccurate measurement readings and compliance issues. Your primary focus is to meet environmental regulations and to ensure that your plant is operating as efficiently as possible. But, say that your plant does endure problems, what then?

What steps can you take to solidify your performance issues?

It really depends on what sort of operational setup you have. If you are using an air bubbler system, the easiest choice is to upgrade your instruments, such as pressure regulators, to improve your performance.

Updating your equipment nets you the efficiency you seek at an affordable price; however, you still have maintenance and energy costs - and you will still experience degradation of your results over time, so these expenses are ongoing.

Another option that you may employ is to replace your existing bubbler system with an alternate technology. Though a larger investment, the LUT400 ultrasonic level controller can eliminate many of the overall long-term maintenance and operational costs associated with a bubbler system. Since the system does not come in contact with the process or material, there are no real ongoing maintenance issues to deal with, such as cleaning the rag build-up, clogs, or scale build-up from the air tube.

Regardless of how you look at it, though, if your plant has performance issues, then you will be spending money. The question you need to ask yourself is, “How much money am I willing to spend?”

While weighing the options of making a small versus large investment, here are some questions that I found to be helpful:

• How frequently do I have to update my instruments?

• How often do I have to fix my instruments?

• How many air bubbler applications are running off of one compressor?

• What’s the size of the compressor?

• What are my maintenance personnel costs?

• If I’m getting inaccurate level readings, how detrimental to my operating process is it?

o And, what will happen? Will it spill over? Will it leak?

In the end, it really depends on how your system is set up. There are many cases where air bubbler systems have proven to be great solutions and provide benefits at the lowest cost whereas other situations have shown that ultrasonic level controllers can be more beneficial in long-term operation of your systems.