article was written by our respective colleague Ing.Robert Elingr
Founded in 2008, ORMONDE has grown into one of the leading companies in the field of industrial cleaning in Central and Eastern Europe. From its headquarters in Ostrava, it offers cleaning services in fourteen countries around the world and significantly helps to improve the technical and economic parameters of the technologies used. It specializes in providing safe and effective industrial cleaning solutions with a focus on reducing the operating costs of the customer’s technology by increasing the efficiency and production capacity of their equipment.
By the standards of a professional medium, I allow myself to be more personal. I had been working at ORMONDE for ten years when a local heating company in the Czech Republic approached me with a request to clean the main condenser. The heating plant’s query sounded somewhat unusual:
“You know, we normally clean the condenser with long brushes and it works great. The pipes are clean and we are satisfied. But the technology restoration contractor requires the condenser to be cleaned with high pressure water. We don’t believe you will be more successful than our cleaning method, and we want to prove that to the supplier.”
At first, I didn’t want to accept such a job where the customer doesn’t really want us, but on the other hand, he couldn’t have motivated me better to show the true capabilities of our high pressure water cleaning technology. To show that ORMONDE really provides services that reduce energy costs.
We accepted the challenge, presented the technological procedure and price offer, the customer ordered the cleaning. “D” day has arrived. A 2,500 bar high-pressure unit with a two-person crew and a robotic manipulator arrived at the Heating Plant, and after a short installation, it started standard cleaning work in the usual way. The routine course of work did not indicate anything unusual. Only the amount of material that we flushed from the condenser tubes might seem unusual, but it was not significantly different from similar orders.
However, the contractor’s representative was unusually uncomfortable, watching with astonishment the ever-increasing amount of material under the cleaned condenser, when it was, according to all assumptions, already cleaned and clean in front of us. The work ended as expected after five days of cleaning. For his money, the customer got a silvery condenser and fifteen buckets of sand for free. We thanked each other, said our goodbyes, and promised to meet to evaluate the cleanup after the technology was back in operation.
Quality cleaning pays off
After two months, my phone rang and the customer invited me to a meeting. With a very serious face, he calculated for me the achieved changes in pressure and temperature difference after cleaning the condenser with our high-pressure water cleaning technology:
“We reduced the electricity consumption of the circulation pumps by 11 kW by reducing hydraulic losses, we increased production by 700 kW with the same fuel consumption. Well, to sum it up – your entire cleaning paid for us in 11 days and we’ve been making money ever since.”
I was not surprised by the result of our work, but I was pleased with the way the customer himself presented it and worked with the obtained values:
“We are working on a model that, based on changes in inlet and outlet temperature, will tell us when to invite you to clean again to maintain the technology’s performance gains.”
The result of the cleaning thus proved what we knew from other orders and what theoretical studies claim, namely that the highest changes in the efficiency of the heat exchanger are achieved by removing the thinnest layers of deposits and that it pays many times over to invest in high-quality cleaning of the exchanger.
We found a new business partner, and what’s more, a partner who thinks really economically and understands the money spent on maintenance as a means of getting much more money from an efficiently functioning technology. We have already repeated the cleaning of the condenser together once and are preparing for the next one. After the astronomical increase in energy prices in recent months, the authors of the model were forced to significantly adjust the input parameters. The cost of cleaning the condenser now pays for itself in less than four days.
