Is Pumping Dirty Costing You Money?

In this article, George Dodwell, ABB Water Framework Manager – South highlights how pumping dirty can be costing you money:

Did you know? Your pump isn’t running at its peak efficiency unless it’s clean!

It is becoming more and more common within the water industry today to run pumps on variable speed drives for efficiency reasons, ABB variable speed drives can also help to keep your pump clean.

Here is a very good example of improved efficiency with a clean pump. We recently visited a large water site and came across a pump that was running with a small amount of rag and foreign objects. The pump was processing around 900l per minute. We turned on “Pump Cleaning” within the variable speed drive and after a pump cleaning cycle the pump output increased to 940l per minute without changing the speed of the pump. Therefore, we have increased the pump efficiency by over 4% just by running a cleaning cycle.

What is Pump Cleaning?

Pump cleaning is a feature within the ABB ACQ580 drive which enables you to go through a process of jogging and or reversing the pump to allow you to free the impellor of rag. Which can in turn lead to running your pump cleaner and not needing to run the pump for as long, in order to pump the same volume of liquid. Which in turn leads to an energy/cost saving/more efficient pumping.

Efficient Pumping

While we are talking about pumping efficiently let’s have a think about pumping slower for longer too. This can lead to significant energy savings. As a pump is a variable torque load, we can apply the cube law in order to generate savings.

If we slow the pump down by 20%, we will save around 50% of the energy used and only need to run for fractionally longer in order to achieve the same output.

Want to know more?

Whether you are thinking about slowing your pumps down and are concerned about it affecting your process or if you want to understand more about pump cleaning. Why not put a call into IDS and get your pumps optimised with the ABB ACQ580 pump cleaning feature and have them optimised so they are only pumping what you need, in the most energy efficient way!

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Call: 01159441036

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