Buying the best and most correct Wastewater Pumps

Unsure which pump is best for your needs and for getting rid of wastewater? Well there may be a few answers here as to how to best make this purchase. Wastewater pumps perform a behind the scenes, yet critical, job that most people do not think about. They are often working in places you cannot see and yet so around us as such in terms of where they are relied upon to carry out key and critical functions.

Getting the sizing of the pump correct

Sizing a wastewater pump is like sizing a pump for a clean water application: Users need to know the application information such as flow and head, fluid type, and installation orientation or space constraints. With wastewater applications, however, there are a few other factors to consider—the biggest being solids. Fibrous materials such as flushable wipes and rags lead to ragging issues in lift stations and wastewater plants.

How they are used

Submersible pumps can be used in a vast and varied number of applications. It’s one of the core reasons they can seem like such complicated pieces of equipment. Saying that, for the average person, a submersible pump has a number of uses – one of them being draining unwanted bodies of water. A submersible pump is suitable for draining flood water and other unwanted bodies of water. Often situated in basements and other areas that experience frequent flooding, the automatic function on an electric submersible pump allows you to clear water without being present.

Transporting wastewater to treatment facilities – how this is done

After water has served its many uses, it needs to be collected and transported to the wastewater treatment plant to be treated and returned to the environment. Wastewater flows increase along the collection system toward the treatment plant.

Combined pump stations are designed to handle the daily wastewater flows. This is as well as stormwater and other surface run-off and are common in many wastewater networks. When designing a combined station, you should consider the normal fluctuations. This tends to be from the sewage network as well as the maximum inflow resulting from storm events. Both these inflow rates can differ widely from each other. The maximum inflow can be much greater than the normal flow.

What you also need to know about waste water

Wastewater can be difficult to transport and manage. There are often large amounts of organic solids, rags and other waste matter that challenges wastewater pumps. This is since spills and overflows will cause damage to the environment and result in fines. This is when state of the art pump station designs and proven non-clog pumps for tough media and all your specific pumping requirements.

You need to really have a good think of what will be going through the pump, how the pump will work and even how you will be able to fix the pump if there may be any issues down the line. Pumps do go wrong after all. You need to also think too if you will have a maintenance expert on hand also.

The cost of unscheduled pump maintenance

On from the above points raised, this is an area so often never taken into account. It’s good to have a contingency in place for and with this kind of thing. The cost to unblocking sewage pumps is one of the largest contributory factors to unscheduled pump maintenance today. All of this very much overall will have an impact on the whole life cost when small sewage pumps block once a week. Unscheduled maintenance surpasses any arguments about energy saving quite significantly.

The physical cost of pulling rags out of sewage pumps in the UK is unknown. The energy costs associated with blocked pumping systems is significant; there is serious loss of energy when a sewage pump is not free flowinG. There is little point in installing energy-efficient wastewater pumps.

Pump speed – often overseen and forgotten

Pump speed control offers by far the greatest savings potential if you think of clean water transport. What is perfectly normal in other fields of application, i.e. matching power input to actual demand, is still far from standard practice in many branches of industry. In practice, a detailed analysis of a pump’s operating behaviour often reveals that it is not running at its optimum, energy-efficient operating point.

A common cause for this is operation at off-design conditions due to either system oversizing or normal temporary variations in flow rate arising from system processes.

Very important

When selecting a wastewater pump, consider the application constraints and features needed in a pump system. If easy maintenance is of the essence, choose a self-priming or dry-pit installation. If cost is an obstacle, submersible pumps will allow for a more compact installation. In either case, weigh efficiency versus solids-handling capability for long-term operation and reliability of the lift station.