City of San Diego Alvarado Filtration Plant Water Quality E & W Laboratories

BACKGROUND

The City of San Diego Water Department's Alvarado Water Treatment Plant serves as the heart of San Diego's drinking water system and has a capacity of 150 million gallons a day. The plant's current expansion and improvement project has three aims:

1. Increasing capacity and reliability to meet current and future water needs,
2. Meeting or exceeding new, stricter water quality regulations, and
3. Having a state-of-the-art facility that will have a useful life of 75 years.

The labs that support water treatment, particularly those of a major metropolitan area, are among the most heavily used in the world. Before Alvarado's laboratories were retrofitted with Phoenix Controls equipment, lab workers faced multiple problems, including significant cross-contamination between clean water labs and standard labs. These problems caused a major downturn in lab workers' productivity, test accuracy, and efficiency, and an upturn in worker frustration, lost time, and overall cost.

SOLUTION

When the Phoenix Controls equipment was installed, the problems were eliminated. Newmatic personnel annually re-commission the installation, which includes 54 variable air volume fume hoods over a 21-lab area. The labs are a model of efficiency, including the use of Phoenix Controls' industry-leading Usage Based Controls. In addition, 102 air supply and exhaust valves were provided and are annually commissioned by factory-trained Newmatic Engineering technicians.

FINAL ANALYSIS

Due to Phoenix Controls' superior products and Newmatic workmanship, cross-contamination in the labs went from being an intractable problem to being a thing of the past. Fume hood capture and containment is flawless. Newmatic Engineering continues to enjoy a solid, on-going relationship with the Alvarado Filtration Plant.