Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
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a must. For motors, all end-users should have a Motor Management Policy. This documents every single motor and offers a series of maintenance policies from rewind to replace. For VSDs, ABB offers a database called Installed Base. Any VSD that you buy is automatically registered in the database including date of purchase, location, application, loading, parameter setting and maintenance intervals. The tool enables maintenance budget allocation to be based on the criticality of each drive asset, and ultimately prolongs asset life. Whenever a maintenance routine is due, the tool alerts you and can schedule a visit from a qualified service engineer. SPONSORED BY STUART FOSTER, UK WATER MANAGER - DRIVES, ABB LIMITED Why asset management matters Keeping a detailed asset inventory at a treatment works is a must, and is the first step towards an effective asset management approach H istorically, maintenance of assets such as motors and drives has never been high on the list of priorities for water companies because of the large degree of redundancy built into their sites. There was always another unit that could be switched in while the duty unit was out of service. This has changed in recent years as water companies find themselves having to service higher customer demand, leading to them to use all their capacity The Talk: opinion JAMES BROCKETT, EDITOR, WWT English water sector must tackle nationalisation question Labour's policy of renationalisation for the English water sector has opened up a debate, and it is up to the industry to make the case for its own legitimacy I t's not oƒen in recent years that mainstream politicians have had much to say about the UK water industry: even quite significant changes and reforms in the sector, such as the introduction of outcome delivery incentives or non-household retail competition, have taken place without being in any danger of being mentioned at Prime Minister's question time in the House of Commons or in a leader's speech at a party conference. However, that has changed in recent "With the growing de- mand for resilient pump- ing systems, a lack of asset knowledge could be proving more costly than you think. Unless the motor and VSD are regularly maintained, the 60 per cent energy savings that you bought into could be far less." months, with the adoption by the Labour party in their election manifesto of a policy of renationalisation of the utilities. Since Jeremy Corbyn's surprisingly positive showing at the June election, Theresa May's travails have made another vote at some point in the next year or two look a likelihood, and the possibility that privatisation in the water industry might be rolled back – until recently something considered unthinkable by most – is now a very real prospect. In his recent conference speech in Brighton, Corbyn pointed to the fact that six of the nine English water and wastewater companies are owned by private equity or foreign sovereign wealth funds. "Their profits are handed out in dividends to shareholders while the infrastructure crumbles," he told the conference delegates. "The companies pay little or nothing in tax, and executive pay has soared as the service deteriorates. That is why we are committed to take back our utilities into public ownership, to put them at the service of our people and our economy and stop the public being ripped off." I've spoken to a number of industry figures about this in recent weeks, and they have all more or less said the same thing – it's not true that the infrastructure is crumbling, and by almost any measure, the performance of the industry since privatisation should speak for itself. However, you can't rely on the man or woman in the street - who understandably doesn't take a close interest in how their water gets to their taps or how their wastewater gets taken away - to know this. The industry needs to get better at communicating to the public (who are their customers aƒer all), about what it does and how it spends their money. Only by doing that will it make the case for its own legitimacy. What is more, this argument shouldn't concentrate on the achievements of the past, but why the water bills paid today represent value for money. Neither is the argument cut and dried. The privatised English water sector might be considered by many to be a success story, but publicly-owned Scottish Water and not-for-profit Welsh Water show that these alternative ownership models can deliver just as effectively. Like it or not, the nationalisation question has put the water industry in the unaccustomed glare of the front line of politics: from now until the next election it is now up to the sector to stand up to that scrutiny and show what it is worth, one way or the other. and reducing their scope for redundant systems. Now, asset maintenance is coming centre stage as companies seek to maximise the reliability of assets that are in near constant use. With dozens of electric motors and VSDs on a typical water treatment works for example, it seems reasonable to assume that a site would have a detailed inventory of every single asset. Yet this is not always the case. Even sites that know where their VSDs and motors are located may not have any other intelligence about the maintenance records or schedules of such assets. With the growing demand for resilient pumping systems, this lack of asset knowledge could be proving more costly than you think. Unless the motor and VSD are regularly maintained, the 60 percent energy savings that you bought into when the pump system was installed could be far less. But with so many assets across a typical site, do you have in-house maintenance teams that can handle the volume, let alone have the technical skills to know what to maintain? You have two choices: train your engineers or outsource to a motor-driven pump specialist. Whichever route you choose, generating a detailed asset inventory is 8 | NOVEMBER 2017 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk Here is the new design. Any enquires should be sent to: sean.austen@ksb.com 01278 458 686