Custom designed and manufactured domestic water pressure booster system with two surge tanks tested in our in-house test lab.
By Shannon Gallagher
Metropolitan Industries, Inc.
Our production facility is always bustling with new and ongoing projects being simultaneously worked on. Each day, fabrication, assembling, programming, and testing are all in-house functions that occur each day at Metropolitan Industries, with each engineered system custom manufactured to solve a customer’s specific water handling challenge.
A specific project being readied for shipping is a custom domestic water pressure booster system serving a high priority data center. Equipped with twosurge tanks, this unique design will ensure that the facility is able to have on-site water storage in event that either a city-wide or facility-based issue disrupts the utility water source.
In a typical booster system application, water enters from a water utility source, then gets boosted up throughout the building to supply water to all the floors. A typical booster does not have a surge tank system, which means in the event of water disruption to the booster’s intake, it will not be able to provide water throughout the facility, which may affect occupancy that leads to further disruption to normal work operations.
The storage tanks were sized to meet the customer’s specific requests as they considered both the anticipated average daily water demand and overall gallons needed. The surge tanks were ultimately selected based on this duration and anticipated building occupancy.
Under normal circumstances, water flows through the top of the surge tanks and out the bottom to feed the water pressure booster pump skid. The system was designed so that water flows through the tanks and water is never stagnant.
Another interesting feature is that the system comes equipped with combination vacuum break/air release valves, as well as a SS tank vent filter. The valves ensure that the water flows freely in and out of the tanks. High flow vent filters were chosen to maintain safe, balanced pressure during the filling or emptying of the storage vessel while the tank vent filters are essential to reduce the possibility of contaminating the stored volume.
We also paid close attention to the hydraulics of this system. We employed variable speed operation of each booster pump to adjust to the widely varying suction pressure conditions.
While the addition of the two surge tanks might be a unique attribute with booster systems, our ability to accommodate such customization is not unique with Metropolitan Industries. With our in-house team of mechanical draftsman and electrical engineers, Metropolitan has the resources to design project-specific customizations with each packaged system in preparation for eventual assembling – all under one roof.
Initial drawing of the two surge tanks sketched by our in-house engineering department.
