Bulk Chemical Storage to reduce manual handling

Introduction

One of Hydro-X Water’s existing sites is a leading supermarket distribution centre. Within their site is chilled and frozen section with 3 small evaporative condensers on the roof.

During one of our regular reviews, as part of the continual development program we had with this particular client, there were two particular issues that were highlighted.

Challenge

Once these issues had been highlighted, we arranged a site visit to view these issues. We noticed that the primary problem was the current system they employed was dosing from the chemical drums at each tower. This created two main issues:

1. Manual handling of 25kg chemical barrels up 5 flights of stairs. The site staff had been doing this every week for over 10 years and was a risk to the health and safety of the employees carrying these barrels.
2. On occasion, the chemical would run out. Although it was not frequent, it did still occasionally occur and was only picked up by the remote system monitoring that was in place. This also led to additional engineer hours as once this was noticed, they had to rectify the issue.

Solution

To upgrade their chemical dosing systems, we first installed a bulk storage tank at the ground level. These are large enough to hold 6 months’ worth of chemicals which would eliminate the need for site staff to carry the chemical drums up each week

Following this installation, our team ensured these bulk tanks could feed directly into the smaller tanks that were at roof level. The system provided centralised chemical dosing for the site to cover all three systems and supplied consistent chemical availability to reduce the likelihood of it running out.

Value added

The new chemical dosing system installed by Hydro-X Water completely removed all manual handling of chemical and improved COSHH controls across the whole system. It also resulted in the site staff not needing to carry any more kegs or switching over the barrels, thus removing the team from any chemical exposure.

Due to having the bulk drums added to site, it has also led to a reduction in the number of deliveries per year, reducing the transport CO2 emissions to help the company meet their company environmental targets as well.