Welsh Water back on stream thanks to midnight rescue 25 June 2013

Recent overnight work by ABB drives supplier APDS allowed Welsh Water to continue serving customers after two variable-speed drives (VSDs) failed at its Tynywaun water treatment works.

The works, near Treorchy in South Wales, has a capacity of 10 mega litres a day and uses the VSDs for the interstage pumps, in a duty/standby configuration.

The duty drive had suffered a failure but when the pumping load was switched to the standby drive – which had been in operation for 15 years and was near its end of life – that also failed.

Marek Cegielski, Welsh Water's mechanical, electrical and instrumentation supervisor for the region, says that, with the failure happening at 7:00 pm, by 7:00 am the next day the area would have run dry, with stored capacity exhausted.

Says Cegielski: "Initially, I called our incumbent drives supplier, but they told me they could only get a drive to me following a four-week lead time." Says Cegielski.

"I called our capital investment team who recommended APDS, as they had done previous installations for us and we were already considering ABB as a drives supplier under a new framework contract."

Bristol-based APDS sales and marketing manager Alan Jones says that, when he got the call at 8.00 pm, he loaded two ABB ACS800 75kW drives and reached the site at around midnight.

"By 5:00 am, we had the drives up and running, and pumping water before the first tanker was due to arrive," recalls Jones.

"Alan pulled out all the stops to get us back in action," comments Cegielski. "At first I did not have much hope that we could be back on-line by the morning, but Alan and APDS sorted it all out in the middle of the night and we have had no problems with the ABB drives since they were installed."

Brian Tinham

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