Wilo’s cleans up in the East End of London

Wilo has provided a solution to a major problem for a London-based social housing provider, that was experiencing issues because of poor heating system circulating water quality.

Poplar Housing and Regeneration Community Association (HARCA) owns and manages around 10,000 homes in East London. Like many social housing providers, the organisation realises the importance of clean water in heating systems to ensure that the systems operate efficiently and without problems for their tenants and leaseholders. It’s vital that particularly with high rise developments, there is virtually no debris circulating in the heating systems. In addition, removal of air and micro-bubbles from the system will also ensure the system operates smoothly.

The property has four boilers. Wilo offered to run its new particle separator system on a protracted trial to illustrate the benefits of the system and to address the issues the property had. The main issues identified were mechanical seal failures on pumps due to poor system water quality as well as poorly made up joints during the installation of the system. Leaks were causing the system to constantly introduce new clean water to the system, which was diluting the inhibitor, reducing its effectiveness and helping to cause unacceptable levels of debris forming in the system.

Wilo’s new Wilo-SiClean Comfort is a particle separator system that is integrated into heating systems to provide automated circulating water cleaning. The system was installed in the basement plant room of the property and the discharge from the system runs to drain. The Wilo Si-Clean Comfort is a ‘Plug and play’ system, simple to install and maintain and is designed to provide particle separation for larger heating systems.

Over the period of the trial, the results showed huge improvement to the system circulating water – a large reduction in conductivity – 12% - and a reduction of the iron in the water samples taken – by a massive 75% - which is the main reason for mechanical seal failure and damage to pump reliability. There was ample evidence of the removal of the black magnetite sludge from the system, clearly seen where the system was drained. 

Dave Barnett from Poplar HARCA says: “We ran system health check reports on the system before we installed the Wilo equipment, during the trial and at the end of the trial and the results were very good.”

For more information on this story, click here: April 2019, 122
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