The gambling Casino in the City
of Hull, Québec, overlooking
the beautiful Ottawa River,
welcomes over 4,000 visitors
per week. People are attracted to this new
Casino for entertainment and some to
find fortune. Unfortunately, things were
not so rosy at the Casino’s pumping station.
City Engineers and operators were
starting to worry about the capabilities
of the station that they had just recently
built.
The problem
Soon after its completion, the pump
station started to experience serious
clogging problems. Both of the station’s
two pumps had to be taken out of the
wet well, dismantled and thoroughly
cleaned, before putting them back into
operation.
“During 1997 the pumps had to be
cleaned fifteen times, costing time and
extra operating expenses”, says Jacques
Desbiens, operator for the City.
Under normal circumstances, using
regular submersible pumps would have
been fine, but it was later discovered that
a nearby industrial park was dumping
its effluents directly into the City’s sewer
system, which then found its way to the
Casino’s pumping station. Plastic bags
and twine were regularly found wrapped
around the pumps' impellers. This was
a major challenge for any pump.
The solution
Confident that the new N-Pump
would solve the clogging problem, ITT
Flygt offered the City of Hull one pump
for a trial period. One of the existing
pumps was left in operation to enable
the comparison of both pumps' efficiency.
Each pump handles 70 l/s and
alternates at the end of each cycle. Both
pumps have the same power rating.
The N-Pump was installed in December
1997 and is still in operation, with
no problems. Here are just a few of the
positive results:
· A dramatic decrease in emergency
maintenance. The station had to be
cleaned twice since the N-Pump was
installed, as opposed to fifteen times in
the same time period before its installation.
The station showed a 23% increase
in overall efficiency.
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