Potable Water Upgrade for Homabay Residents
With Weholite, raw material properties have been combined with advanced production technology to create a lightweight engineered solution with superior loading capacity that is chemically inert and provides an extremely long service life. This means that designers, owners and operators can be confident that Weholite HDPE systems will have an in-service life of at least 100 years when buried and 60 years above ground* when materials, products and installation practices meet the appropriate requirements.
Over the years, Homa Bay residents have lacked access to clean and safe water despite the county’s proximity to Lake Victoria, the largest tropical freshwater lake in the world and the situation had been worsened by worn out and outdated pumping machines and electrical systems at the intake point of the Lake. The machines, which were installed over 50 years ago are currently not working properly.
However, there is hope for the residents of the county with the installation of the new water treatment equipment.
For this particular project, Megapipes supplied 12 large mixing tanks, six for each system and housed on two different sites. Each system uses 6 tanks for combining common water treatment chemicals.
The vertical, free-standing Weholite system, is made up as follows:
4 chlorine contact tanks utilising calcium hypochlorite for disinfection. These are manufactured from DN1200 Weholite and each has a capacity of 1600 litres.
4 flocculation tanks dosing aluminium sulphate made from DN1500 Weholite with a capacity of 4800 litres each, and;
4 pH control tanks each at 4200 litres capacity and also produced with DN1500 Weholite HDPE structured wall pipe.
Each tank was fitted with a stainless steel flanged mounting system to support the electro-mechanical mixing units that were being supplied directly from Belgium. Megapipes also provided the inlet and outlet valves for dosing in the treatment works and each tank has a sight glass for ease of use.
However, it didn’t stop there. As part of their scope on the project, Megapipes carried out a pre-delivery route survey, provided delivery services and after installing the tanks in the correct position, performed hydrostatic testing services to prove the integrity of the system.
The tanks are lightweight, durable, easy to install and abrasion-resistant and show the credentials of Weholite systems when utilized in the offsite build environment.
Offsite construction, which is becoming more and more prevalent in the industry, can be simply defined as the part of the construction process that is carried out away from the construction point, generally but not always, in a factory or sometimes in specially created temporary production facilities close to the construction site. It is well documented that this method of construction provides far greater value to the overall project and Weholite is tried and tested the World over on this type of building methodology.
Megapipes Technical Sales Engineer Robert Maina commented, “Weholite is the ideal product for these types of applications and has a proven track record in the water industry. We look forward to providing more of these long-lasting value based solutions to the Kenyan Water Industry over the coming years.”
