Propelling the NHS to Net Zero with smart pump tech

Any healthcare setting must run like clockwork to always ensure patient safety. At the heart of hospital services, hidden away from patients, most staff, and the public, are plant rooms. An area that could be described as the ‘engine room’ of any hospital, plant rooms transport water and other mission-critical supplies around the building. This is also where circulating and booster pumps can be found; these appliances are crucial to distributing hot and cold water throughout the building within seconds.

There’s a reason why these plant rooms and pumps simply cannot fail. If they do, this could disrupt clinical activity, see wards shut down, and create an unsafe environment for both patients and staff. At a time when the NHS is already under unprecedented pressure with a growing backlog of patients in need of assistance, this must not happen.

Major contributor to carbon emissions

While ensuring safety may sit at the top of the list of priorities, maximising the energy efficiency of these plant rooms isn’t far behind. The NHS is responsible for around 4-5% of the UK’s total carbon emissions, with the NHS in England contributing to 40% of the public sector’s total emissions. If the NHS is to reach its ambitious target of becoming Net Zero by 2045, it’s crucial that these figures are reduced.

Many hospitals are already making inroads in order to future-proof the sustainability of their operations. With some relying on the consistency of over 50 plant rooms to transport a significant quantity of water throughout a single building, the challenge of correctly specifying and maintaining pumps in the healthcare setting often requires a collective effort — but it is possible.

Given that they are at the nucleus of any hospital, it is vital that plant rooms receive regular, specialist monitoring for accurate and efficient operation. Industry professionals will understand that individual pumps have various levels of ‘health’, and that this ‘health’ will deteriorate over time. While the responsibility of monitoring the condition of pumps in a plant room tends to fall to Estates and Facilities personnel, it is often the case that, due to their busy workload, individual pumps can be overlooked.

With EFM personnel increasingly moving between healthcare settings, there is the risk that Estates managers may be unaware of the equipment that resides within a specific plant room, and may not have an up-to-date asset list for the room. As a result, such personnel may also not know when specific equipment was installed, who installed it, and when it needs to be serviced or replaced.

Since Estates managers typically need to spread their expertise across a wide range of disciplines, many do not have sufficient specialist knowledge on pumps. While this is understandable, it is crucial that specialists from the pump industry are enlisted to provide clear maintenance schedules within healthcare settings.

Difficult access

Navigating plant rooms is tough — not only due to knowledge gaps. but also because these areas are often extremely tricky to access. Some plant rooms may be located on top of hospitals, or hidden away in near-inaccessible locations, creating a logistical challenge for auditing and replacing pumps. Careful planning, consideration, and often complex procedures, are needed for demounting, removing, and installing, new pumps in such areas, especially if they are heavy and hard to carry.

Suppliers like Wilo offer a solution to these challenges, providing expertise in consolidating existing assets, creating comprehensive asset lists, and deploying effective planned preventative maintenance (PPM) solutions. A straightforward yet effective PPM schedule is the traffic light system, which ranks equipment from red to green. Simply put, equipment ranked ‘red’ requires urgent attention, ‘amber’ may need attention soon, and ‘green’ equipment is in good health. Wilo has adopted these schedules to assist with arranging maintenance routines and keeping on top of documentation, in turn reducing the potential of any sudden and unexpected downtime. Remote monitoring, preventative maintenance, and service agreements can also be arranged, removing the sole onus on Estates managers to remain on top of this.

It’s important that any supplier understands that plant rooms are, in a plethora of ways, delicate areas. Any third-party staff should undertake the correct training and receive certification to enter these areas, so as to not cause any additional problems. For example, industry professionals are encouraged to undertake CSCS training, and also to pass the obligatory CITB health, safety, and environment test.

Achieving NHS Net Zero ‘the smart way’

Once the plant room’s contents have been established, and a suitable plan has been established on how to stay on top of maintaining the pumps inside them, a collaborative effort from Estates managers, pump manufacturers, and industry specialists, can catalyse the NHS’ ambition to reach Net Zero.

In recent years, one of the most significant innovations in the efficient running of healthcare facilities has been the advent of ‘smart’ technology, which has reduced the responsibility on individuals by introducing helpful automated solutions. Smart pumps, for instance, not only move water around a building, but they also provide immediate energy savings through intelligent, automated operation which can be used to establish an ongoing energy usage strategy in a healthcare setting. To illustrate this, pumps like the Wilo-Stratos MAXO are designed to ‘learn’ the operational characteristics of a heating or cooling system. Used in conjunction, circulating pumps can be configured to adapt in real time to demands, and operate holistically with other building services.

These ‘smart’ functions simultaneously supply Estates managers with detailed data while keeping plant and equipment running optimally by identifying any issues before they risk causing disruption through inefficient operation, or even breaking down.

Performance data, warnings, alerts, and notifications can ensure that systems are always maintained and working to their highest efficiency. The advances in smart pump technology provide data on heat, volume, and cooling flow. Combining this data with other smart systems yields a better insight into usage patterns, which can result in better-regulated indoor climate control that keeps power and water usage to a minimum, reducing needless energy usage and expenditure.

Manufacturers can help users, such as an NHS Estates and Facilities Department, to specify the right pumps for the application, in addition to forecasting energy and cost savings. Wilo, for instance, can provide an energy audit while drawing up an asset list. These audits will reveal quantifiable cost and carbon savings that will help to determine the ROI, as well as how many years it will take to repay investment in a smart pump.

Futureproofing in full flow

The first step to correctly specifying and maintaining pumps in the healthcare setting is simply acknowledging the need to do so. One NHS hospital in the north-east of England did just that — last summer Sunderland Royal Hospital approached Wilo and initially asked it to conduct an energy survey of one of the estate’s several plant rooms. The plant room in question was associated with the hospital’s metabolic laboratory, an underground area difficult to navigate through narrow and dark corridors. During the survey, it was determined that the three existing pumps working in the metabolic laboratory’s plant room were between 16 and 18 years’ old, and therefore in need of replacement. Applying the trusted ‘traffic light’ PPM system, all three pumps were labelled with a red light and deemed critical replacements.

The traffic light system used was similarly applied to a variety of equipment detailed in the asset list, including the heating pumps, booster sets, and expansion vessels. As with any asset list, this was created to provide the Estates manager with further information and clarity around the ‘health’ of this particular plant room. In this case, the traffic light system proved extremely beneficial to those involved, allowing staff to prioritise what needed upgrading, when by, and the potential implications of a particular plant room breaking down. Wilo’s traffic light system ranks any equipment less than five years old as green, between 5 and 10 years’ old, amber, and anything over a decade old is ranked as red.

Following the energy survey, Wilo agreed with the hospital to install a new hot water circulator pump, a variable temperature pump, and a constant temperature pump, within the specified plant room, having labelled all three original pumps as ‘red’. Replacing these pumps not only provides the assurance of reliability, but also means the hospital benefits from long-term carbon and cost savings due to the high-efficiency pumps offered by Wilo. The estimated time for complete return on investment in all the pumps will be around three years post-installation, proving that they are a viable, cost-effective solution to reducing the NHS’s carbon emissions.

In addition to supplying and installing the new pumps, Wilo also offers remote monitoring of the pumps and the plant room condition. This is undoubtedly beneficial to Estates managers that simply don’t have the time to consistently monitor the health of the many plant rooms they are responsible for, and simultaneously increases the likelihood of an issue being spotted before it worsens. The collective effort between the teams involved was crucial to the success of the pump installation at Sunderland Royal Hospital

Aiming for a safer, more efficient NHS

Acknowledging the safety-critical nature of plant rooms and pumps in healthcare settings, a concerted effort from both ‘in-house’ Estates and Facilities personnel and external specialists is essential, as illustrated in the outlined case study. The holistic use of smart pump technology allows for the collection and analysis of crucial data, contributing to significant cost, energy, and carbon savings, all while propelling the NHS closer to its Net Zero aspirations.