Commercial Case Studies
St. Helena hospital ice machine
Installer
HydroFLOW West.
Customer
St. Helena Hospital in St. Helena, California.
Application
Ice machines.
Installed Unit
HydroFLOW s38.
Background
The water at the facility has very high silica content, estimated around 80 ppm, causing several problems related to ice machines:
- Frequently replace parts due to difficulty of removal of the silica build‐up on the components, costing up to $1500 per year.
- At many of the ice machine locations, a reverse osmosis filtration system was in place, which created bottlenecks in the water supply; the ice machines were not able to keep up with demand from nursing, which resulted in frequent calls to the engineering staff.
- The refrigeration engineer responsible for the maintenance of the ice machines was spending up to 180 hours per year cleaning 22 ice machines throughout the facility.
Results
- The labor associated with ice machine maintenance has decreased to 100 hours per year.
- The costs of replacement parts have decreased by $750 per year.
- Calls to the engineering department due to ice machine inability to meet demand have completely stopped, thus reducing callouts from 6 hours per month to 0 hours per month.
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