Global healthcare company BSN Medical Pinetown factory in KwaZulu-Natal was, in January handed a 500,000l water harvesting system.
This is set to help the company reduce its environmental impact and operational costs as part of its global green initiative.
Rainwater.com, a division of Tizagenix was selected for purposes of design and installation of the system at BSN’s facility, with project construction that had started in June last year and concluded in December.
The system was officially handed over by Tizagenix in January after a three-month period for monitoring during which the system managed to recover and supply 1.63ml of processed water to the BSN factory.
Manna Hoogenboezem, Tizagenix MD explained that the rain and storm water recovered was from the factory’s roof and paving that cover an area of 16000 m2 and drained into a 500mm storm-water pipe system.
This system then extends 3.5m below ground level where the water will be filtered and thereafter transferred to the rainwater storage tank above ground. Once above ground the water is further treated and used as process water for boilers and cooling towers.
Rainwater from the underground storm water pipe is directed to an open channel that distributes water to a bank of Wisy WFF300 primary rainwater filters. This open channel will allow for monitoring of flow behavior and control of water flow to individual filters.
Hoogenboezem states that excess rainwater from the filters is then discharged back into the main storm water line.
The filtered water from the Wisy WFF300 filters will flow into a water sump below the filters, where calming inlets will be waiting to reduce turbulence in the clean-water sump. The sump has three submersible pumps that pump the filtered rainwater to the main aboveground storage tank.
A control system that uses a variable-speed drive, is used to manage the water level in the sump, automatically stopping and starting the pumps when needed or deactivating the system when the storage tanks have reached full capacity.
