Case study: pumping solution

Smart Storm develops innovative products for use in the water and wastewater industry and designs instrumentation and systems required to meet the demands of pollution prevention and control.

As a provider of water and wastewater equipment, Smart Storm needed a pumping solution that offered reliability, accuracy and the ability to lift trade effluent up to seven metres, prior to it being measured and analysed, without a secondary pump being required.

Therefore, in 2013 Smart Storm implemented a design exercise to replace its existing wastewater sampler with a new product that would meet the harsh demands of industrial wastewater sampling.

Super sampler

The new product, known as the Hydrocell sampler, included the Universal Smart Instrument (USI) as its instrument controller, which offers the only wastewater sampler on the market with a graphical user friendly interface and Windows CE programming, Smart Storm claims.

“To ensure the new product exceeded the specification of the existing product and that of our competitors we also required the pump to perform to a higher standard than that of the old sampler pump,” says John Duffy, Smart Storm’s managing director.

We chose the Verderflex pump because its vertical lift capacity of nine metres far exceeded that of other manufacturers’ pumps, its reliability was very impressive and it was extremely robust

John Duffy, Smart Storm’s managing director

After a rigorous testing process, Smart Storm opted for the Verderflex R3DC OEM peristaltic pump, which is compact and is designed to be easy-to-maintain.

“We chose the Verderflex pump because its vertical lift capacity of nine metres far exceeded that of other manufacturers’ pumps, its reliability was very impressive and it was extremely robust, Duffy says.

Failure free

Duffy says the pump can often be the weakest part of a wastewater sampler, meaning reliability is paramount.

“Sending engineers to site to repair pumps is extremely costly and time consuming. We have now been using Verderflex pumps on our samplers for two years and we have not had a single failure,” Duffy says.

“We use the pump across our complete sampler range from single bottle samplers to multibottle refrigerated samplers. The Verderflex pump along with the advanced USI controller made this Hydrocell range of wastewater samplers the most advanced on the market.”

Verderflex sales engineer Neil Thomas says the R3DC is ideal for demanding wastewater sample applications. “It features a robust design with thick-wall tubing, and in addition to its high lift capability and a DC motor which can accommodate speed and flow-rate variations, it can handle flow rates up to 3.4 l/min,” says Thomas.

You can see more about the R3DC here.