As coronavirus continues to spread across the country, many facilities including college dorms, hotels, vacation condos, shopping malls, and other buildings are being shut down unexpectedly or operated with very low occupancy.  As a result, building water systems that normally have hundreds or thousands of gallons of water flowing through the fixtures, piping, and equipment daily may be stagnant for an unknown period of time, maybe several months. 

Should your Water Management Plan (WMP) Program Team decide to utilize environmental water sampling to validate the effectiveness of the WMP, ANSI/ASHRAE 188-2018 advises that these tests should be performed by a laboratory accredited to a nationally or internationally recognized standard (e.g., ISO/IEC 17025:2017), with Legionellaa included in the laboratory’s scope of accreditation.

Before environmental sampling is undertaken, a Sampling Plan should be formulated.  This plan should list the devices and Points of Use (POUs) to be sampled, at what frequency sampling will be performed, what the acceptable control limits will be, and what the response protocol will be for any sample result(s) falling outside of the previously-established control limits. 

Steam quality and steam purity are topics which often get confused with each other.  Distinguishing the difference between the two will help you understand the unique impacts they have upon a steam system.

Understanding steam quality requires understanding vapor-liquid equilibrium in water. As heat is added to subcooled liquid water, it proceeds to the saturated liquid curve and becomes a saturated liquid (moving from incoming city water to point A). At the saturation point, any heat added to the water will form a vapor and the temperature will remain the same because all additional enthalpy (heat energy) being added to the system is being used to change the phase of the water from liquid to vapor.

Factories, warehouses, healthcare facilities, commercial buildings, and office spaces generate unwanted heat that must be removed from the process, equipment, or occupants inside. Chillers may be used to remove this heat by transferring it to the atmosphere either by air or water cooled chillers. At the heart of the chilling process is the evaporation of a liquid refrigerant into a gas. Two basic types of chillers include vapor compression and absorption. In this blog, we will focus on the vapor compression chiller.

Steam boilers do exactly as their name implies, they produce steam; however, may factors must be considered and managed to do this, including corrosion, scale, water minimization, fuel efficiency, safety, and Total Cost of Operation. Boiler feedwater often contains dissolved gases, such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, and ammonia. These dissolved gases are problematic for the boiler system because they may cause corrosion, leading to equipment failures (e.g., carbon dioxide can form carbonic acid in boiler condensate, lowering the pH, and corroding the condensate piping). To minimize corrosion, the dissolved gases must be removed or neutralized. This can be achieved through the use of deaerators, which work to remove such dissolved gases to low levels reducing the amount of follow-up neutralization required (e.g., sulfite-based oxygen scavenging).

We are often asked to review, audit, improve upon, or otherwise comment on Water Management Plans (WMP’s) consisting of no more than a few pages of boilerplate text which, in reality, are actually NOT Water Management ‘Plans’ at all.  Rather, they are simply Legionella control policies.

So, what’s the difference between a “Policy” and a “Plan”?

Policy (always a noun):  a course, principles, rules, guidelines, etc., proposed or formulated by an organization, government, business, or individual, typically published or promulgated throughout the organization, in order to direct organizational behavior towards (or away from) a particular goal, objective, or condition. 

The phrase “Part Per Million” is a term we use to describe very small amounts of something in a much larger amount of something else. Here are some examples of one part of something in a million parts:

On a recent episode of the Public Broadcasting Systems’ Frontline “Flint’s Deadly Water,” investigative reporters looked deeply at the city of Flint from 2014 to now in hopes of identifying the true causes of the water crisis and the cause of the many deaths. As an outsider, we immediately associate Flint with a lead crisis, which undoubtedly remains an issue. However, Frontline finally dives deeper and states that Legionnaires Disease is the true public health crisis that happened in Flint. Below is a summary of the research they did and their findings.

Thermal energy storage (TES) systems are cooling systems that can use ice banks, brine systems, or chilled water storage tanks to capture BTUs for the purpose of removing a heat load at another point in time. In practice, the chillers for the TES operate outside peak electrical load hours and store the BTUs in the preferred form for use during peak electrical load hours. This practice reduces strain on the electrical grid and provides both cost and energy savings for the owner.

The purpose of a boiler inspection is to provide assurance of equipment integrity to minimize safety issues with operating a pressure vessel. A minimal frequency is established by law and the Insurance Company that is covering customer liability in case of any operational failures. It has a useful secondary function of acting as an early warning of potential problems and determine the water treatment program’s effectiveness.

An internal boiler waterside inspection consists of all waterside areas of the vessel (e.g., steam and water areas, blowdown lines, feedwater connections, and low water safety devises) as well as dearators, superheaters, economizers, and blowdown heat exchangers. If possible, this inspection...