RO plant for new luxury hotel designed and installed in record time

Managers responsible for the construction of a new luxury hotel in Jamaica knew from the start that they would need to produce all of their own fresh water. For a number of reasons, however, commissioning of the new plant was delayed. So, while the list of design demands was long – Including best-in-class OPEX, extensive control automations and plug-and-play simplicity – the lead time was not.

“The biggest challenge we faced in this project was timing,” explains Álvaro Fraguela, Gefico’s sales director. “We ended up with only a four-month window for the entire project, so there was very little time for mistakes of any kind. But our engineering department was confident that they could deliver and have the plant running in time when the hotel opened its door for the hotel’s first guests.”

“We were not in doubt that we would use Danfoss APP pumps and iSave ERDs for this project,” says Marta Herva, head of Gefico’s engineering department. “Many years of close cooperation with Danfoss in both sea- and land-based sectors have given us a lot of experience with their technology, and we were confident that they would meet the customer’s needs for energy efficiency. Because the Danfoss solution is also extremely compact and requires fewer components than alternatives, it also simplified building the skid-based plants necessary for plug-and-play installation simplicity.”

To ensure that the hotel would always be able to produce enough fresh water, even during routine or emergency maintenance procedures, engineers recommended a two-train 1800 m3 /day plant, with each 900 m3 /day train built around Danfoss components:

• 1 APP 38/1500 with 90 kW tropical insulated motor with space heaters
• 1 iSave 50 with 18,5 kW tropical insulated motor with space heaters
• 4 Danfoss VLT® AQUA Drives

Gefico designed, built and tested the plug-and-play skids at their facilities in Spain before shipping them to Jamaica, where they arrived just weeks before the hotel opened. In all, the lead time was under four months. Installation of the plug-and-play trains was predictably simple and fast, with just a few piping connections necessary on site, and operations have been smooth since the plant went online.

“In addition to very good energy efficiency to get the best possible OPEX, it is important for our customer to reduce maintenance to the absolute minimum,” says Fraguela, “so Danfoss’s long maintenance intervals are a definite plus in this regard, too.” To further simplify maintenance, the plants are fully automatic and can be monitored and operated remotely from the hotel’s control center.