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Industrial plant and installations

For many industrial facilities, clean water is vital, with any breakdown or non-compliance with legislation having devastating effects on operations and costs. However, maintaining supplies of clean water in the face of increasing regulation is becoming evermore difficult and expensive.

Whether it’s supplying hot and cold water to a small office block or large quantities to major industrial processes, failure to provide correct water quality can lead to inflated production costs, escalating fuel costs and increasing downtime for maintenance and repair.

Cooling towers and evaporative condensers
The Notification of Cooling Towers and Evaporative Condensers Regulations 1992 requires all premises with wet cooling towers and/or evaporative condensers to register with the local authority. The prime purpose of this is to identify potential areas that could give rise to spread of legionella and to ensure preventative measures are taken to eliminate the risk of such infection arising to employees and the public.

Organisations tend to concentrate on Legionella bacteria but this is only one of four interacting areas that must be controlled together: corrosion, scale build-up, bio films and microbial activity; the presence of any one may indicate the presence of all four. The key is to take an integrated approach to risk assessment.

Helping industrial operations both large and small comply with ACoP L8 for the control of Legionella bacteria in water systems is AquaCare Water Hygiene Services’ primary objective.

Useful documents

HSE Guide: Legionnaire's disease - a guide for employers - HERE
OPSI: Notification of Cooling Towers and Evaporative Condensers Regulations - HERE

 

Microbial activity is just one of four equally important interacting areas in industrial processes:

• Corrosion
  Corrosion product formation leads to scale deposition, changing the metal's surface electro-potentials, accelerating corrosion
• Scale
  The break up of salts and corrosion build-up leads to suspended solids that provide nutrients for micro-organisms in bio films
• Bio films
  Localised bio-fouling creates the ideal hiding place for Legionella bacteria as well as increasing acidic metabolic waste which leads to more corrosion
• Microbes
  Biologically active sites provide ideal sources for solids precipitation leading to scale, providing optimum hide-out sites for micro-organisms such as Legionella