Most commercial organizations use pumping equipment of one sort or another. Pumps are thought to be the most common machines in existence second only to levers. Where pumps and valves are installed, there is obviously an unavoidable reason for them being there. Unlike some other electrical and mechanical devices, pumps and some valves require specialist knowledge to design systems and select the most appropriate equipment.

When all of the pumps and valves on a site are viewed as one large energy-consuming machine it makes sense to pay a great deal of attention to ensure that your pumps and hydraulic systems are designed to achieve optimum efficiency and lowest whole life cost

A major factor today is the whole life operating costs, this must be studied in depth taking into account capital cost, time to maintainence, time to failure, cost of service parts, cost of down time, labour costs, loss of efficiency and the very real issue of disposal costs of materials and lubricants

Our analysis will evaluate which pumps are protected by duty / standby arrangements, which pumps can be repaired with an acceptable down time and which are the critical pumps that should be kept as replacements.

As an example of how this affects your business we can use a simple pump project installed to lift waste-water a total height of 10M over a distance of 320M at a rate of 20 litres per second. We used a major pump manufacturers actual selection software for the following examples

Example A) a main contractor with little knowledge may result in the wrong pumps being installed. To save capital costs a run of pipework is installed using 100mm bore. The calculated duty point for this system is 20L/s @ 30M. The pump selected is a 20Kw machine with a pump efficiency of less than 40%.

Example B) Our advice is to use 150mm pipework and selecting a pump with at least 60% efficiency. The calculated duty point for our system would be 20L/s @ 15.6M. The pump selected is a 6Kw machine with an efficiency of 64%

The result of this taking into account a typical usage of 14% pa and energy at £0.05 per unit is: -

Example A Power at duty point 15.9Kw cost pa £1112.00, power pa 19499Kwh

Example B Power at duty point 4.7Kw cost pa £483.00, power pa 5764Kwh
The environmental impact is 13735Kwh power saved and a running cost difference of £629.00 pa. The price of a 6Kw pump is obviously significantly lower than a 20Kw machine as are the spares. There are also fewer raw materials used in manufacturing the pump

A very common application for Larox Pinch Valves is in pneumatic conveying systems for example in a fly ash or bottom ash conveying

We recently had an enquiry from a UK power generating station that uses chicken manure to fuel the boilers. The system has a pneumatic conveying system to transfer spent ash 

This type of system uses a storage vessel called a blow pot, the ash is dropped into the blow pot which then seals using a shut off valve. The system is pressurized then another valve opens and the product is transferred

This company are using valves which require overhaul every two weeks, the parts cost around £90 per valve, it takes around three hours to do the overhaul, they have lost production of three hours and the mean time between failure is ten days

To replace the complete valves using Larox Flowsys Pinch Valves had a capital cost of £5000.00 per valve

I agree with your gut reaction, this is very expensive and there is no point even considering changing  HOWEVER

Over five years, the existing system costs £65,700.00 to own and there is 730 hours of lost production
Over the same period the Larox Pinch Valves cost £17,316.00 to own and the lost production is 30 hours. Ignoring the cost of lost production, this is a cost saving of £48,384.00 over five years or £12,000 + per year every year the system is in service