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Watertight
The real price of pumping

The bottom line of a pumping system purchase isn't the price on the original invoice. It's the total of all expenditures at the end of the system's useful life - its Life Cycle Costs.

You don't need a detective to uncover the true costs of a pump installation. A Life Cycle Costs (LCC) analysis makes it possible to figure the cost of a pump installation over its lifetime, including energy usage, operational costs, maintenance and other big-ticket items.
     LCC analysis has long been used in other industry sectors, but it is only beginning to be used to evaluate pumping systems. Gunnar Hovstadius, director of technology for ITT Fluid Technology, says that is very good news.
     "An LCC analysis will give the end user an opportunity to save money in the long run," he says. "Too often a pump purchase is based almost exclusively on the initial purchase price. But if you have an energy-intensive application and a big pump, a 10 percent increase in efficiency might more than recover the original purchasing costs."
     Pump Life Cycle Costs: A Guide to LCC Analysis for Pumping Systems is a result of a joint effort by the Hydraulic Institute, an association of pump producers in North America, and Europump, which represents 15 national pump manufacturing associations in Europe and more than 400 manufacturers. The US Department of Energy's Office of Industrial Technologies also collaborated in the project. The guide describes essential pumping system components and explains how to write specifications, design and operate a system for minimum life cycle costs.
     "Purchasing departments are, unfortunately, rewarded on how cheaply they can buy something, not on the product's life cycle costs," says Hovstadius. "The easiest thing is just to look at the initial price."
    Judging from the experience in other sectors, that kind of thinking may soon change in the pumping industry. Airlines have employed lcc analysis for years in the purchase of aircraft. Large military procurements of airplanes, tanks and carriers are also often based on lcc analysis. The trucking industry considers this type of analysis a valuable tool in making a rational purchase.
     In Hovstadius' view, improving pump system performance is too often overlooked as an opportunity to contain costs. Pumping systems account for nearly 20 percent of the world's electrical energy demand, and in some industrial operations account for 25 to 50 percent of the energy usage. By understanding the components of pump ownership and how they can be influenced, the owner can "dramatically reduce energy, operational and maintenance costs," he says.
     The LCC of any piece of equipment is the total expense of purchasing, installing, operating, maintaining and disposing of the equipment. LCC is determined by following a methodology that identifies and quantifies all of those components. Used as a tool to compare alternatives - buying a new design or overhauling the old one, for instance - the LCC process shows the most cost-effective solution within the limits of available data.
     The components of an LCC analysis typically include initial price, installation and commissioning costs, energy expenditures, operational costs, maintenance and repair costs, downtime costs, environmental costs, and the cost of decommissioning and disposing of the equipment when its useful life is over.
    In some installations, energy consumption is the dominating cost in the LCC, especially in pumps that are run more than 2,000 hours per year, says Hovstadius. In other installations, maintenance is the heaviest cost. The cost of unexpected downtime and lost production can, in some cases, be greater than the cost of energy use and replacement.
     "The most difficult part to estimate is the maintenance costs, because you don't know how long the equipment will last or how often it will break down over the typical lifetime of a pump, which is 20 years. That is very difficult for the manufacturer to estimate because it depends on how the machine is being used and where on the curve it is being operated," explains Hovstadius.
     In this instance, common sense plays a role. "If you buy a car, it will last longer if you drive it carefully than if you race it. It's the same thing with a pump."
     A possible way to address these costs is through service contracts, in which the price of maintenance is set from the beginning, but this assumes that the party taking on the risk has some influence over how the system is operated.
     Proper system design is the most important single element in minimising LCC, says Hovstadius. This means evaluating the interaction between the pump and the rest of the system and calculating the operating duty point or points. All pumping systems comprise a pump, a driver, pipe installation and operating controls, and each of these elements is considered individually. The characteristics of the piping system must be calculated to determine required pump performance.
     "Regardless of the type of pump you've purchased, it will be cheaper to run if you've designed the system to run in an optimal way," says Hovstadius.

Sidebar:
N-Pump fares well in LCC analysis

ITT Flygt has been employing LCC analysis in evaluating certain of its products, including the N-pump. This pump stands up very well in LCC analysis because it is more efficient and requires less maintenance than traditional pumps. The N-pump uses less energy and has less of a tendency to clog, so sustained efficiency is higher.
"If you don't have to go and unclog the pump regularly, you save a lot of money on maintenance," says Gunnar Hovstadius, director of technology for ITT Fluid Techno-logy. In some N-pump installations, energy costs have been cut by as much as 25 percent. Pump stations that frequently sounded the alarm for emergency maintenance are now running without any alarms at all.
"So even if a pump is a little more expensive to purchase, it can still make a lot of sense, because the initial costs may only be 5 to 10 percent of the total lifetime operating costs," Hovstadius says.