Some industrial productions can cause major blockages in the drain pipes and unblocking them can cost a lot if you don’t have the right sewer cleaning equipment.
This is the case of an important ham factory in the Czech Republic, where PTC technicians recently carried out a test with a Built-In unblocking unit. It is a huge factory for the production of cured meats, active 24 hours a day, seven days a week: it is therefore easy to imagine the quantity and type of material that is continuously deposited in the drains.
Despite the size of the exhaust pipe used by the plant, made of steel, over 50 meters long and with a diameter of 300 millimeters, the grease and other residual scraps from the production that are deposited in the pipe force the company to contact us at least every 15 days to an external company for doing sewer cleaning, with a huge expense and repercussions on production planning.
Furthermore, simple sewer cleaning with cold water had never given sufficient results, so the company chose to try to intervene with a hot water system.
PTC intervention
For these reasons, the ham factory asked to test the PTC sewer cleaning equipment. A team traveled to the Czech Republic with a van fitted with a Built-in unit. These are autonomous sewer cleaning machines, designed to be set up on vans or small trucks and, depending on the type, can be equipped with one or more water tanks, if source of water is not available at the site of intervention. It’s used even to stabilize the water flow.
In this particular case, a Moses unit was used: this compact unblocking unit is equipped with a Diesel engine up to 50 HP (35.5 Kw) and a HPP high pressure triplex pump, produced directly by PTC, with a pressure up to 200 bar and a high pressure hose up to 100 meters long.
The PTC Built-In are machines that can work both for unclogging and for other types of cleaning, therefore the various models produced can easily adapt to the different needs of the customers. The one in question, given the specific request, was equipped with a Hot Box high-pressure boiler, with an electronic temperature regulation system, capable of reaching high temperatures (up to steam) to allow flexible operation based on the various heating applications.
Among the main advantages of the Built-in units, as found in the Czech Republic, there is the possibility of easily accessing places that are difficult to access for conventional vehicles, such as large trucks. The advantage of PTC compact sewer cleaning equipment is that they can be operated via a radio remote control and be used by a single operator, who can do the job of unclogging.
Hot and high pressure
The sewer cleaning equipment bases its operation on the pump that generates water at high pressure and produces a jet of water necessary to unclog drain pipes and sewage systems.
The water is introduced into the system to be cleaned through a nozzle attached to a high pressure hose: this feature allows the operator to easily maneuver and retract the hose, considering the massive size and heavy weight of a rubber hose tens of meters. Finally, the high-pressure water jet is delivered through a nozzle which directs the flow in the desired and most suitable way to purge the pipeline. By combining the force of high pressure, it manages to reach the height of the closure and perforate the obstruction, so that the fragmented material can flow out freely.
A hot box was also used for cleaning pipes of the ham factory, to use water at 50 degrees and exploit the high temperature to more easily break up the incrustations and fat that the production of cured meats pours into the drain pipe.
A mix of high pressure and high temperature that has given excellent results. The PTC technicians, with the aid of a camera-probe, lowered the pipe by about 3 meters, using an external manual pipe-guide mounted on a pulley, penetrating the pipe easily and avoiding hitting edges and risking damaging the pipe as well as exploiting maximum machine performance. A first attempt with a simple nozzle did not give the desired results; so a rotating nozzle was installed, managing to free the entire pipeline in just a few minutes.
Once the 500-litre tank was filled, in a very short time the pipe that runs entirely through the subsoil of the plant was cleaned. With the propulsion given by the high pressure at 150-200 bar, the nozzle passed through the blocked pipe without particular difficulties, while the water at 50 degrees did its job, pushing it forward and at the same time cleaning the internal surface of the pipe .
The advantages of hot water
The test was very useful for understanding the advantages that a plant of this size can obtain from owning internal sewer cleaning equipment, compared to an external intervention:
- Saving on intervention costs;
- Programming of the intervention, without interrupting production;
- Preventive maintenance of pipelines, without risking breakdowns;
- Possibility to intervene on the pipelines whenever you want, without detergents and without damages.
This specific intervention carried out on an industrial structure is currently in great demand for urban cleaning operations in world countries where temperatures drop below zero for many months of the year and civil sewers and pipes are literally blocked by frost. PTC, for example, has a large market for hot water purge equipment in many countries around the world.
In these cases, the action of the hot water is associated with the use of specific rotating nozzles, to restore the original conditions of the pipes in a short time and therefore saving water.
