Total Water Treatment Program Cost

Add the three bills and you have the number a plant manager is judged on: water and sewer, chemical, and the energy it takes to move and cool the water. On the tower used throughout this shard that is $15,768 of net water and sewer, $14,235 of chemical and $27,500 of fan and pump power — $57,503 a year. Written that way the priorities reorder themselves immediately. Chemical, the line everybody negotiates hardest, is under a quarter of the total; energy, which almost nobody attributes to the water program at all, is the largest single item and the one most sensitive to whether the condenser tubes are clean.

Run the equation backwards and it becomes a budget tool: a $60,000 envelope with $28,000 of water and sewer and $12,500 of chemical leaves $19,500 for energy, and if the plant is actually spending $30,000 the tower is telling you something — fouled fill, a scaled condenser, a fan running on high with a fouled approach, or simply a bleed valve passing and pushing every one of these lines up at once. Two honest limits on the total. Every term must be entered in the same currency, because there are no exchange rates on this site and the answer is simply the sum in whatever currency went in. And the sum is an operating cost only: it carries no labour, no service visits, no capital or depreciation on the tower and pumps, and no cost of the failures that poor treatment eventually buys — a retubed condenser or an unplanned outage is not in here, and it is usually larger than everything that is.