Major Production Facility within Dairy Industry

The Opportunity

Following an audit and review of our customers steam raising plant and pre-treatment, we identified a potential to reduce gas consumption and subsequent costs. We issued our customer with a report detailing their current chemical and pre-treatment regime and proposed we install a reverse osmosis unit to ultimately improve steam quality, reduce boiler blowdowns and subsequently reduce gas consumption. During this survey we took into consideration their current fuel costs, chemical costs, blowdown percentage and condensate return.

The Solution

Whilst installing a suitably sized reverse osmosis unit would have saved our customer on fuel costs, we also identified where else we could make the system more efficient. Local to the boiler house are two evaporative condensers which have considerable bleed off rates. As part of our proposals, we offered an option to recover this bleed off water from the evaporative condensers and treat it before feeding this through the reverse osmosis unit which would supply the hot well.

By doing this, our customer would use significantly less make-up water for the steam raising plant. We offered a package which included the recovery of the evaporative condenser waste water (which saved on effluent treatment), installation of a back up supply to the reverse osmosis (for when there is insufficient evaporative condenser bleed off for demand), carbon filtration, duplex water softener and final filtration prior to the reverse osmosis. Boiler blow down has reduced since the installation of the equipment from 16/20% to 2-2.5%.