BACKGROUND
Yorkshire water is committed to building robust and resilient clean and wastewater networks, serving 5.4 million people and 140,000 businesses. They invest in innovative technologies such as SAM4 to monitor its critical assets and achieve resiliency while preserving the environment while keeping customer bills as low as possible.
THE CHALLENGE
Yorkshire water operates over 670 water and treatment works, many in remote and hard to reach locations. A highly critical asset type within their wastewater production are screw pumps. Any downtime or failure that may occur on these pumps results in high replacement costs and environmental risks of sewer overflows, leading to a pollution event.
Manual inspections and traditional condition monitoring techniques, such as vibration analysis, won’t uncover the root causes of the top three failures of screw pumps in time, to schedule and conduct repairs before the failure occurs.
THE SOLUTION
Samotics uses ESA technology whereby sensors are installed inside the motor control cabinet, enabling the monitoring of submerged assets. SAM4 is able to detect both electrical and mechanical faults, and can catch the top three inlet screw failure modes up to five months in advance, all from the remote safety of the motor control cabinet. SAM4 is able to spot root causes of failures and send out tailored alerts to enable in-time maintenance, reducing unplanned downtime, high reactive maintenance costs, rental costs of pumps and pollution fines.
RESULTS
ROI of 2000%+ on monitoring 8 screw pumps, through prevented failure detection, resulting in £230k+ costs savings:
- Preventing several days of downtime
- Preventing mitigation & repair costs of £100K
- Preventing large pollution events (sludge potentially entering surface waste – mitigated fine of on average £130k)
Yorkshire Water is now rolling out SAM4 Health to 4,500 suitable assets across both its clean water and wastewater networks, including borehole pumps, storm screws, and pumps in most parts of the process. The company will also use SAM4 Energy to lower emissions and raise efficiency on the road to net zero.
— Simon Rhodes, Business Transformation Manager, Yorkshire WaterWithin a month of installation, SAM4 Health saved us enough on inlet screw repairs and mitigation to pay for the entire project, twenty times over…Preventing even one inlet screw failure a year would provide a positive business case, even if nothing were to happen at any of our sewage pump stations or our blowers.
