Surgery Center Case Study
It’s never too early to consider water treatment when designing or planning a new construction/retrofit.
Secondwind Water Systems recently installed a reverse osmosis system to feed four humidifiers in a New Hampshire high-tech surgery center. The drawback with this job is that we got the call after the building was built. Copper piping cannot be used with reverse osmosis water, so a plumber had to tear out walls and a ceiling to install new PVC piping to feed the humidifiers. Unnecessary expense and time could have been avoided by bringing us into the building process at the very early stages.
Late last year, surgical operating rooms were retrofitted at an existing medical facility serviced by city water. The required humidity range in an operating room is 20% to 60%. In a poorly humidified/ventilated hospital, there is a higher risk of airborne infectious particles, something all hospital want to avoid at all cost. Immersion coil humidification units were installed during this retrofit to provide the specified humidity range to the operating rooms. Once up and running, heating elements in the humidifiers kept failing, sometimes within 2 months’ time, due to scale buildup.
Air quality specifications were not being achieved and the surgery center fell out of compliance. In some cases, scheduled surgeries actually had to be cancelled; not good for the patient and not good for the hospital.
A number of treatment options were considered by Secondwind. When you are creating steam, any and all minerals will be left behind in the heating chamber/element, including salts. Secondwind specified and installed a reverse osmosis system on the feed water to the humidifiers and is able to remove 99% of the minerals and prevent heating element scaling and subsequent failure. We also included an integrated controller that ties in with the automated control system in the building so the facility’s mechanical equipment can be monitored remotely.
Call Secondwind early in your commercial building process so we can identify whether water treatment is important to consider for your project.
