Package Sewage & Effluent Treatment Plant: Problems with Specification, Design, Installation, Commissioning and Troubleshooting
Examples from Previous Projects (2)
b. New Housing Development
Several package plants which were supposed to treat effluent from small housing developments, usually including ammonia removal. Several years after installation, after the original installers had failed to make the plant work, we were called in to see if the plant was working. The plant was found never to have worked, having been radically undersized by incompetent "designers". The plants were too small ever to work, and are now being replaced, repaired or upgraded at the designers' expense, as the works were covered under NHBC guarantee. Before our visits, the "designer" insisted the plant worked, despite there never having been a passing sample. This is a fairly common occurrence, and we have been called out to several plants answering to the previous description.
c. Country Hotel
A package plant which had created odour nuisance for years at a country hotel was found to have been fitted with feed pumps which fed the plant at twenty times its maximum rated flow by unqualified "drainage engineers". This plant has also never worked, but the suppliers had sold the client irrelevant or positively detrimental bolt-on extra products over and over again, none of which addressed the basic problem. After five years of this we were called in. The plant is now being modified to bring incoming flow within the package designers' allowable flow rates, which has solved the odour problem. The "drainage engineers" still do not understand that the plant did not work, let alone why.
d. Private Country House
A package plant at a large country house which was in perfect working order was scrapped on the advice of someone calling themselves a "consulting engineer" despite having no degree in any subject, or even any tradesman's qualifications. Our client was asked to pay for the replacement plant, which had been so oversized in an attempt to cover up for the lack of knowledge of the so called engineer, that it would not work. The purchaser of the plant had wasted a great deal of money, as the so called engineer did not understand that the root of the problem was not simple overloading, but lack of control of effluent arising from a new laundry discharging to the plant. Our client has been advised to install their own small plant much more cheaply than becoming involved in the problematic installation.