AxFlow delivers good performance for Royal Ballet
It took just nine hours for AxFlow to replace aging water-booster pumps in the Royal Ballet School’s Floral Street campus in central London. The building is in almost constant use, even at weekends, and it was not possible to shut off the water supply during working hours.
Working with facilities-management company CMS, AxFlow drew up a schedule that would allow them to enter the premises at 9 p.m., shut off the water supply, remove the three existing pumps and replace them with new energy-efficient pumps. It was vital to ensure that the premises were completely vacated before work could commence.
Denis Yeoman of AxFlow explains, ‘We took this opportunity to provide the Royal Ballet School with a cold-water booster solutions that would make use of the existing manifold infrastructure and give an energy-saving solution that offered the greatest degree of flexibility for the building.
‘Our solution was to install three Grundfos CR1-10-6 multi-stage Blueflux pumps fitted with Lowara Hydrovar inverters. Each pump has a middle curve capability of 11 m3/h at 45 m head. We also replaced the existing control panel with a 3-pump isolator panel. Much to the satisfaction of the customer, we were able to reduce equipment and costs by re-using the existing manifold due to the existing pipework being of a good standard.’
Lowara Hydrovar inverters can recognise any pump failure and automatically bring another pump on stream to take over the duty. It is also possible to program an overall pressure-setting increase for every pump while they are all running. If the inverter detects insufficient discharge pressure after a certain interval of operation, it turns the pump off and attempts to restart it up to five times.
