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 are installed, there is obviously an unavoidable reason for them being there. Unlike some other electrical and mechanical devices, pumps require specialist knowledge to design systems and select the most appropriate equipment.

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

We can provide recommendations for improvement of existing systems, potential for up grading of  systems and optimum design for new projects.

Our role may be to work as a specialist with a main contractor or as an independent source of expertise to industrial users. We can be your pump specialist available to provide advice and support during factory shut down periods.

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 contractor with little knowledge may result in the wrong pumps being installed and to save costs a run of pipework 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 would have recommended using 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.