Calculate How Much Grit is Costing Your Plant Using this Free Spreadsheet

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Calculate How Much Grit is Costing Your Plant Using this Free Spreadsheet

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Conventional grit removal systems, on average, allow 60% of all grit that enters your treatment plant to pass through and damage downstream treatment processes. Grit that is not captured at the headworks causes numerous problems that degrade performance throughout your entire treatment process. The two main categories of damage are abrasion and deposition.

Grit induced abrasion shortens the life of virtually every piece of moving mechanical equipment in a plant. This shortens the operating life of items like clarifiers, pumps, mixing components and conveyance equipment. Over time this adds up to significantly increased equipment maintenance costs and unexpected downtime.

The more insidious effect of grit is deposition. Most treatment processes aren’t designed to process inorganic materials like grit and don’t have sufficient velocity to scour the grit from the process. Instead, grit accumulates and reduces process efficiency. Many processes, like aeration basins and digesters, gradually fill up over time until the entire process fails and needs to be taken offline to be manually cleaned out. This is an expensive and time-consuming process that would have happened many years later without the presence of grit. Deposition smothers aeration diffusers. This forces blowers to work harder, consume more energy, and fail much faster than they should.

Since grit causes these problems over time, submerged and unseen, it can be difficult to see grit’s impacts until it’s too late and you have a major process failure. Grit impacts so many different treatment processes that it can be difficult to assess just how much money and time your plant is wasting on avoidable grit related expenses. Over the years, Hydro International has gathered data from projects at WWTPs just like yours that had grit related process failure and/or unnecessary grit-induced maintenance tasks.

This free spreadsheet calculator has real world costs that actual plants have encountered from grit-related problems. It is adjustable based on your plant’s flows and allows you to modify problems you may have already encountered. Finally see just how much grit is really costing you:

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