Condensates require careful management not 'box-ticking'
4 Sep 2012
More attention must be focused on one of the less glamorous areas of the compressed air business, believes Chris Norris, UK service manager at BEKO Technologies:
Bromsgrove, UK - Compressor sales and service staff may hear expressions of pride and satisfaction about a new compressor or the energy saving performance of a dryer or intelligent control system but who ever got excited about a new condensate management system? - until there is a problem that is.
There are masses of variables, type of compressor oil, environmental contaminants and temperature just to name a few so there are possibilities of failures that need to be considered The sad fact is that condensate management is often just about box-ticking.
The factory engineer has many issues, things to go wrong, improvements and cost savings and condensate management is something he just has to do, no choice, no major benefit to the way his department runs (of course the benefit is to us all in terms of protecting the environment). So he has purchased and installed a unit and he wants to forget it now.
Sadly, that is not really possible. Water contains bacteria which cannot be removed by conventional filtration. Bacteria multiply rapidly and under normal conditions 1 bacterial organism per millilitre will grow into more than 1,000,000 colony forming units within one working shift! Bacteria will also produce slime and can produce 100 times their own volume.
If unchecked this will become a serious problem. The outcome will be possibly that on some low-cost systems that the unit will appear to be working but the filter will be inefficient and condensate with too much oil entrained will go to the drains and contaminate our water resource. Significant fines could be levied too.
The other possibility is that the unit will no longer be able to flow the volumes of condensate and will overflow. This is not tolerable but at least the condensate is not reaching the water table and rivers and the engineer has a signal that action has to take place.
When purchasing a condensate management system, users must think about their situation, type of oil, local contaminants will be known and if there are any doubts have condensate analysed to identify the type of management system required.
