Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

Aiming to broaden my attachment experiences, I volunteered to be the client’s representative for witnessing a Factory Acceptance Test of a Medium / Low Temp Hot Water plate heat exchanger set being installed as part of another project.

Perhaps naively, for a piece of equipment coming in approx. £80-100k I expected the factory to have a roof, floor, some walls and a clean(ish) environment. Instead, I met the fabricators on a dusty farm outside Basildon in Essex. I half expected Del boy and Rodney to come around the corner to take me through it.

It turned out that, despite first impressions, they had done a reasonable job spatially, improving what were very cluttered design drawings into a much better arrangement from a maintenance point of view. Valves and key items such as the distribution pumps and dirt / air separators were much easier to access and remove if required than in the original design. Having said that, all the equipment was stored in the open air (in a working farmyard), almost every pipe viewed was surface corroded inside, and the minimum design separation distance of feed and return pipework connections in the header had not been met.

Welding workshop:

Internal corrosion:

I registered all issues into a report for review by the Contractor and the wider GAL project team and requested confirmation of remediation plan for the internal corrosion of the pipework and protection of the equipment from further weather damage.

I’d be very interested if anyone else has done a FAT on a similar system and what the construction environment was like? Also, any views on the significance of rust inside nearly all the pipes – I haven’t dug into the design calculations of the system but I imagine the pumps were designed to meet certain frictional losses which would have been increased from the corrosion to some extent? Could a decent cleaning flush when installed with subsequent inhibitor application during installation be sufficient to smooth / protect the internal surface?

Plate Heat Exchangers (painted blue):

Separately and in an unfortunately similar vein to Kuki’s death on site blog, one of the baggage handlers lost his legs the other week. He was breaking strict protocol by stepping between baggage dolly’s (trailers), when the tug pulled away and he got dragged under one of the dolly’s. A sad reminder of potential catastrophic result of complacency in the work place.