When staff at a small Michigan wastewater treatment plant began to tire of the labor-intensive process of unclogging its sludge pumps, as well as clearing the “jail bars” that were inefficiently filtering inorganic objects from the inflow, Tsurumi Pump provided their automatic bar screens.
At the tip of the Thumb of Michigan on the shores of Lake Huron, the village of Port Austin has a population of less than 1,000 people. While the town was previously reliant on a gravity-fed lagoon treatment system, it later switched to the use of an aeration tank to handle the 85,000 – 200,00 gpd waste from its 338 households and dozens of businesses. The waste had to be initially piped to some 40 lift stations before being pumped to the headworks.
This is where things regularly went wrong, according to Port Austin wastewater plant supervisor Dale Jimpkoski.
“The manual bar screen would catch stuff like shoes, bags and plastic bottles, and we would have to use a garden rake to clear it about three times a day,” said Jimpkoski. “The pumps were constantly clogging up because of sanitary wipes and other hygiene products, slipping through the ½ inch – ¾ inch gaps in the screen.”
Management began to explore other solutions. Detroit Pump, a Tsurumi distributor in Michigan, suggested the front screen-type Tsurumi KW-6049 automatic bar screen as a solution to the plant’s problem. The board quickly agreed. The following month, the screen was installed at the headworks with the requisite controls and float system, for a total cost of around just $10,000.