Water is a vital part of today’s industrial and digital economy. Used to provide cooling, heating, power, and even as a product component, water systems come with both challenges and opportunities. When considering industrial water treatment opportunities, one must evaluate not only their merits but also their associated costs. Calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) is a tool that can help justify the positive benefits of proceeding forward.
What is ROI?
ROI is defined as a metric used to evaluate the profitability of a project by comparing its savings to its cost. There are three types of ROI that should be considered:
- Restorative ROI: Putting things back to an “as designed” condition.
- Preventive ROI: Taking action now to prevent added costs later.
- Opportunistic ROI: Making a proactive change in the system or process to gain savings and/or improve the Preventive ROI.
ROI is usually expressed as a percentage and can be calculated using the following equation. ROI is sometimes expressed in terms of “Payback Period” in years or even months, as well.
ROI = (Savings – Cost) / Cost *100%
Savings
There may be a variety of saving opportunities available at a facility. Some will be more realistic than others. When evaluating industrial water treatment savings, consider the following:
- Water: How much water does the facility and its equipment use? Are there any water-saving opportunities available by improving control, pretreating the water, using a higher-stress chemical product, etc?
- Energy: Is the water-related equipment running as efficiently as it should? Is scale inhibiting heat transfer across heat exchangers requiring more energy than it should (e.g., fuel and electricity usage in boilers and chillers)? Is hot water being wasted down the drain instead of being reused in the system (e.g., boiler condensate)?
- Maintenance: Are repairs costs higher than they should be due to corrosion, plugged piping, etc?
- Equipment Life: Is water-related equipment achieving its expected lifespan or are maintenance issues shortening its life?
- Production: Does water negatively impact production time due to water quality issues, maintenance, and system downtime?
- Labor: Are personnel tied up dealing with water-related equipment issues?
- Fines & Surcharges: Does the local municipality levy fines or add an extra surcharge due to undesirable components in your wastewater?
- Liability: Is there potential for human harm, such as Legionnaires Disease, a boiler explosion, etc?
- Environmental: Can a dollar value be placed upon improving sustainability with better system control, less water/energy usage, greener products, longer equipment lifespan, etc?
- Water Treatment: Are there water treatment savings that can be realized by doing things differently (e.g., changing chemical products).
Tools to Achieve Savings
There are numerous ways to achieve the savings outlined above, including:
- Chemistry: Properly applying the correct chemistry, using higher-stressed options, and evaluating alternatives are ways to reduce water/energy costs, increase equipment lifespan, reduce downtime, and decrease environmental impacts.
- Equipment: Installing or improving equipment such as controllers, softeners, reverse osmosis, and filters can reduce both water and energy usage, decrease maintenance costs, and so forth.
- Service: Properly monitoring and maintaining water-related systems can help ensure the success of a water management program.
- Repair: Repairing water-related equipment will help keep systems running optimally and reduce the amount of water and energy sent down the drain.
- Training: Educating the interested parties on the impacts and value of proper industrial water treatment can help ensure a water treatment program’s success.
- Monitoring: Collecting data regularly both manually and automatically can help evaluate the operational health of a system, identify any long-term negative trends, and troubleshoot any issues that arise.
Saving Opportunities
Each water system will have their own, unique water saving opportunities. Examples that could save water, energy, labor, etc. include:
Steam Boilers
- Increase cycles of concentration/decrease blowdown (with reverse osmosis, dealkalizer, chemical products, or blowdown controller)
- Increase condensate return (by fixing pumps, piping, or condensate receivers)
- Cleaning scale and deposits from heat transfer surfaces
- Minimize condensate line corrosion
- Not running cooling water for sample cooler continuously
- Blowdown heat recovery
- Fixing bad steam traps
- Fixing heat exchanger leaks
- Minimizing carryover
Cooling Towers
- Increase cycles of concentration/decrease blowdown (with higher-stress chemical products, improved blowdown control, pretreatment)
- Preventing overflow
- Cleaning scaled and fouled heat transfer surfaces
- Fixing leaks within system, heat exchangers, pump seals, valves, etc.
- Preventing unauthorized water usage (e.g., washing down floors)
- Drift
- Preventing dead legs
- Minimizing unwanted microbiological activity
- Filter backwash with makeup vs cooling tower water
Closed Loops
- Fixing leaks within system, heat exchangers, pump seals, valves, etc.
- Cleaning scaled and fouled heat transfer surfaces
- Monitoring makeup usage
- Controlling unwanted microbiological activity
- Preventing dead legs
- Preventing water loss from expansion tanks (bladder or O-rings)
Example
A boiler has 1/32” of scale on its boiler tubes which inhibits efficient heat transfer from the combusted fuel to the water. It was determined that chemically cleaning the boiler to remove the scale would save $32,000 per year in fuel costs. The cost to chemically clean the boiler is $10,000. The ROI is:
ROI = ($32,000 – $10,000) / $10,000 *100% = 220%
The payback period would be 3.8 months.
Conclusions
Industrial water treatment opportunities must not only be evaluated based upon their technical merit, but also upon whether they make good, economic sense and achieve the end-user’s goals. Calculating the ROI can help with the decision-making process. Chem-Aqua has the tools and experience to help you calculate the ROI on your water treatment opportunities. Contact us today!