MUNICIPALITY OVERVIEW:
The Village of Bradford is a small rural community in western Ohio. It is located in Darke and Miami counties, and has a population of nearly 2,000 people. Bradford’s waste water treatment plant mainly receives sewage from residences, a couple of factories and a few commercial businesses. The treatment plant’s design capacity is 0.5 MGD.
LIFT STATION DETAILS:
Bradford’s master pump station is a triplex station with three 6″ solids handling submersible non clog pumps. Bradford was experiencing frequent and random failures of mechanical seals in these pumps. Their operations team was often caught by surprise as the cartridge seals would fail without any prior warning or alarm. This lack of pump reliability frustrated the operators at Bradford. In addition to pump downtime and maintenance labor costs, the cartridge seals were prohibitively expensive, sometimes as high as $3,000 per seal, which severely strained Bradford’s finances. Often, Bradford had to wait for weeks to get delivery of spare seals.
INSTALLATION:
The maintenance supervisor at Bradford, Mr. Jay Roberts, needed a pump that will be reliable, easy to maintain, predict and provide warnings of impending problems including seal leakages, have a lower life cycle cost and have excellent clog resistance capability. CP&S and Excel Fluid Group, Crane’s municipal distributor, worked with Jay and offered a Barnes 4SHMD pump for the master station. Crane also provided a 4″x6″ slide rail adapter that fit the base elbow of the existing competitor pump, and a ‘MiniCAS Adapter Relay’ and external relays to connect moisture and temperature alarms to Bradford’s SCADA system. Bradford was very impressed with the Barnes SH and replaced the other two pumps in the station with Barnes pumps. The 4SHMD pump has been installed for almost a decade now, and the village of Bradford has not had any mechanical seal failures or clogging issues.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Pain Points:
• Existing pump was failing frequently due to mechanical seal failure
• Seal replacement cost around $3,000 per pump and took weeks to repair
• The repair time was not prompt enough to satisfy the Village
Solution:
• CP&S provided an SHMD pump with a 25 HP motor
• The new pump fit perfectly into the existing control panel
• The new pump provides warning of impending seal issues with alarm connection to Bradford’s SCADA system