Water and Effluent Treatment Magazine
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18 WET NEWS MAy 2017 Scottish Water keeps services on line with ABB's flexible maintenance • Flexible contracts mean Scottish Water can prioritise maintenance efforts for its water analysers and focus spending on its most critical installations. S cottish Water is using flexible ABB maintenance contracts to help it ensure its five million customers receive a continuous supply of water with minimal interruptions caused by maintenance. As the fourth largest water company in the UK, Scottish Water is the sole provider of water and wastewater services to Scotland, operating in an area of more than 30,000 square miles. Scotland's geography poses particular challenges – with a long coastline of 6,800 miles, the country has a small and dispersed population, requiring a large number of small water and wastewater treatment works. Many of these facilities are in remote or difficult to reach areas. ABB water quality analysers are used across Scottish Water's operating area to monitor and control levels of ammonia, aluminium, colour, iron, manganese and phosphate. By continuously monitoring water supplies, they help maintain levels of these substances within permitted limits and ensure the highest levels of water quality are achieved. The analysers provide continuous automatic measure- ment, with up to six readings every hour. Automatic extraction and analysis provides real-time indication of current process conditions, avoiding the time lag inherent in manual methods. This allows immediate action to be taken in the event of a parameter going out of limits. Given the vital role played by the analysers, it is vital for Scottish Water to ensure they are kept in good working order. Infrastructure Colin Napier is team manager for the East Area, which covers from the Firth of Forth to the far north-east of the country, including the Shetland and Orkney Islands. With each area regional manager, as with other team managers, Napier and his team are charged with maintaining and operating all the company's infrastructure from sources to tap, from reservoirs and treatment sites to the pipe network. With eight team leaders, six covering treatment and two managing the network, there are 115 staff in total, responsible for the operation of 51 water treatment works and more than 250 reservoirs. "All the treatment works obviously have online water quality analysers, with around half of them using ABB analysers. The vast majority of chemical dosing applications have ABB analysers monitoring or controlling, mainly for phosphates, aluminium content and colour," says Napier. Maintaining these analysers is a major challenge for a company with such an extensive network. To help meet this challenge, Scottish Water uses ABB maintenance services to ensure the many water quality analysers across its network are kept serviceable for the maximum amount of time. ABB's care package for its continuous analsers provides support throughout the lifetime of the product, including a dedicated maintenance plan to extend product lifetime and minimise downtime. Main- tenance schedules are flexible to meet process and product requirements, with all spare parts, consumables and reagents being fully managed by the company. Two levels of maintenance are available – Standard Care and Total Care. Standard Care provides a programme of yearly maintenance checks, including calibration for each analyser. Total Care provides a rapid call out service in the event of an analyser failure, and guarantees a response to a breakdown within three days. Each Scottish Water region is responsible for sourcing its own maintenance and care contract. As each regional manager knows their area best, this allows them to optimise maintenance spend by prioritising particular analysers. In-house resources For Napier, the major benefit of ABB's maintenance services is that the instrument gets serviced properly, reducing the risk of breakdowns, without having to rely on in-house resources. "With ABB conducting regular servicing, we don't get a great many failures, with perhaps an incident reported every two to three weeks, which is then quickly dealt with and resolved. This is worth a lot to us – certain instruments have a control function and so we would not want to run these applications manually for long. Where instruments will need to go off site for repair, we have the extra reassurance of having bonded spares in place as back-up." Roy Caig is Scottish Water's team manager for the Southern Area, covering Dumfries and Galloway, Lanarkshire, Edin- burgh and the Borders. He has also used ABB's flexible approach to maintenance to help him fine-tune the servicing required by the analysers in his region. "Initially, we did not have the right contract for our There have been no break- downs reported over the past year ONSITE MAinTenAnce All the treatment works have online water quality analysers every region is responsible for sourcing its own maintenance and care contract