Are we behind the 8 ball in North America?

I've spent this week in Penticton, BC exhibiting at two industry tradeshows conveniently held back-to-back in the same convention hall: The Canadian Hospital Engineering Society (CHES) and the School Plant Officials Association (SPOA). Though we carry a very wide range of products that could conceivably make it onto our table for these two industries, we decided to focus on a growing problem in commercial and industrial buildings across North America including, but certainly not limited to, hospitals and schools. While it is by no means a new problem, it is one that is slowly coming to light - degrading mechanical systems.

It's no surprise that water-borne contaminants can wreck havoc in all kinds of circles, but often non-health related contamintants are ignored for the more immediate bacteria concerns. While no one stands to get sick from these problems, we do stand to spend an awful lot of money on fixing them! The most common example of this is particulate matter - dirt, rust, sand, sediment, silt (call it what you want), algae, etc. all have serious implications for the performance, or more appropriately, the failure of every piece of mechanical equipment you can think of. How well do you think pump seals, mixing valves, control valves, toilet tank valves, showerheads, automatic flush valves, etc. etc. etc. hold up to large loads of dirt? Easy answer - not very well!

It is incredible how much money is being spent on an annual basis, year after year after year, to just keep up with the failures that are seen from poor incoming water quality. And in North America, it seems to be accepted as normal practice. A common thought I hear is that "well, there's nothing we can do about the water the city gives us." Wrong! Well, sort of wrong. True, we can't change what comes in from the pipe to our building, but we can choose to deal with it before we pass that water throughout our entire distribution and plumbing network. What am I talking about? Simple filtration!

There are certain parts of the world where plumbing code strives to be more of a "best practice" rather than just the bare minimum, which seems to be the driving force in North America. For example, there exist inexpensive, easy to operate filtration systems (think of an automatic, self-cleaning strainer) that can be installed at the point-of-entry to commercial buildings that can handle flow rates up over 900 GPM to solve these problems.

Not even a month ago I was in a commercial building commissioning a system on a refridgeration loop. Turns out that from years of use, there was nearly a half bucket load of sand sitting in the pipes on the lower levels. Now this is the city of Vancouver, BC water supply - all in all an excellent water supply. However, we do tend to see high turbidity from time to time, especially during heavy rainfalls. Fortunately the filtration system we were starting up was specifically designed to remove that dirt before throwing it all right back into the distribution system in one big "slug." That system paid for itself in the first 5 minutes of operation!

I can only hope that the mindset will change in North America to one of preventative maintenance, rather than reactive. This mindset is by no means limited to mechanical maintenance, but when a simple solution exists - the arguments for not fixing the problem tend to lose their weight... Fortunately the attendees at these tradeshows know their stuff. They know the problems they deal with, and understand the concepts on how to fix them. Hopefully they'll rub off on everyone else!