The West End Shopping Mall in Budapest, Hungary is one of Europe’s largest shopping malls. It houses over 400 luxury and brand-name stores, it is fully air-conditioned and its impressive futuristic design has won various architectural awards.

However, maintaining the building and a comfortable shopping environment presents a major challenge for the facilities managers, as Hungarian summer temperatures often reach over forty-centigrade.

The site has 3 Baltimore TXV-500 cooling towers with total capacity of 9 megawatt, which work by the process of evaporation. So-called ‘wet’ cooling towers, they allow a portion of cooling water to evaporate into a moving stream of air.

The cooling system experienced extreme limescale build up, which impaired the efficiency of the air conditioning system. This is due to the extreme water-hardness and high level of calcium in the region. This increased energy output, operating costs, and resulted in the system needing to be cleaned regularly using strong chemicals.

Monthly cleaning costs exceeded 2,500 Euros, plus the extra utility costs for topping up the system and the removal of chemical waste. Municipal drinking water was being used for topping-up the cooling towers because the hardness of the ground water, which therefore also increased the metered water costs.
 
To eliminate the high costs and the limescale problem, management at the site decided to trial Hydropath’s patented chemical free water conditioning technology in combination with a water filtration system.

Each cooling tower was installed with a Custom designed Aquaklear ‘P’ unit. A standard P unit was also installed on the side filtration, to enhance flocculation of the extra debris brought by air suction and to aid filtration. A HydroFlow C60 unit was installed to protect customer bathroom water systems.

The cooling system has seen significant improvements following the installation of the AquaKlear units. No new limescale had formed in the pipes of the cooling towers and the existing scale softened, which is easy to filter and wipe away – along with debris and algae.

This has significantly reduced maintenance and energy costs at the shopping centre, removing the need for expensive chemicals and improved the efficiency of the cooling system. The HydroFlow C60 unit significantly reduced limescale build up on the self-pouring taps in the shopping centre’s toilets.

The taps rely on sensors, which recognise when hands are placed underneath, which transmits a message to pour the water. The sensors were susceptible to scale build up, reducing their effectiveness. However, following the installation of Hydropath technology, this problem has now been eliminated.

A further benefit that West End Shopping Centre did not anticipate is that now they do not need to use the treated municipal supply water to run the cooling system, which is charged per usage.

The cooling system now runs efficiently using ground water supply only. Louk van den Bosch of Hydroflow Magyarorszag Kft, who managed the installation of the units in West End Shopping Centre commented,

“Water in the cooling towers is now crystal clear. Almost as good as drinking water – and that’s no joke!”

AquaKlear, Hydropath’s pool water conditioning unit has been used in a unique application at Banham Zoo, near Norfolk.  The zoo is home to over 1,000 animals and the South African fur seals are one of the most popular visitor attraction.  Keepers experienced difficulties maintaining water quality and pH levels in the 64,000 gallon pool due to excessive amounts of algae and organic matter from the size of the mammals and the amount of fresh fish eaten daily.  Problems were also exaggerated in summer due to the higher temperatures.

The entire volume of the pool needed to be filtered every 1.7hrs and sand filters were backwashed 2 to 3 times a week.  Staff at the zoo also spent one day a week cleaning and replacing the water.  During this process the seals were removed from the pool, leaving many visitors disappointed.  Another issue is that the amount of chlorine in the pool also needs to be kept to a minimum as excessive amounts are potentially harmful to the seals.

Zoo management decided to test Hydropath’s patented AquaKlear water conditioning unit for 3 months, which is used extensively for commercial/leisure swimming pools and industrial cooling towers.

Following the trial, an improvement was evident in a few weeks and tests showed that water quality within the seal pool dramatically improved, less chlorine was necessary, chloramine levels dropped, running costs were ‘considerably lowered’ and pH levels balanced at 7.5. Less energy is also used to operate the pool and it requires less maintenance. 

Staff have reduced the amount of times the pool has to be drained to once every 3 weeks.