Water Reclamation – High Purity Water Projects

HISTORY / CHALLENGE

Water Control Corporation (WCC) and Horner Automation’s story started when WCC sought the help of a system integrator (and has since pulled this effort in house). WCC was in the “green” industry of Water Reclamation with another vendor. Their proprietary controls were inflexible, which made troubleshooting and problem solving difficult. Looking for a better way, WCC decided to design their own controls.

SOLUTION

As WCC headed down the value-added path, Horner’s EXL6e became their vehicle. The more WCC used the Horner product, the more features they asked for. Mark Nightingale, a controls engineer, started to utilize every bell and whistle the controller offered, resulting in an intuitive, information-rich, touchscreen controller. Some of the tasks that the all-in-one controller can now perform include:
• Multi-security levels
• Coloration of pipes and component graphics
• Data logging
• Trending
• FTP data access
• Timer countdown (appear to let the end user know that they’re waiting on the process)
• Screen shots recorded from the F-Key

Having a custom programmed controller helped WCC take ownership of the Reclaimed Water product (controller). The Reclaimed Water system controller is a canned program that covers a few different disinfection methods, and can be changed with the push of a button. WCC now had a way to look into the “black box” to completely address any issue that could arise.

Shortly after WCC began to see the benefits of utilizing the Horner controller for Reclaimed Water, they applied the same controller to their High Purity Water market opportunities. Deionized water looks more complicated, but is a more linear process than Reclaimed Water. Once Horner released our XL Prime Series, the EXL6e controllers were soon upgraded to the XLW Prime, and continued to allow WCC to deliver a polished product, monitoring, recording, and alarming when necessary.

Horner’s XL Prime controller provided an option for hidden keys, an upgraded processor and removal of the battery. The upgrade process was relatively seamless, due to product consistency and compatible cutouts, only requiring some re-configuration due to a change in screen aspect ratio.

SPECIFIC APPLICATIONS

A Major Dairy Products Manufacturer – The customer was renovating their facility and needed water treatment equipment capable of producing multiple water qualities for distribution to their laboratory faucets and equipment, device cleaners, clean-in-place system, and HVAC equipment. With strict water quality requirements for much of their process, they needed to be able to monitor the multiple water qualities being distributed from the system to ensure that it meets their process requirements without interruption.

WCC provided a turnkey skid-mounted system approach to meet the multiple water qualities and daily volume
required on-site. The system takes the incoming city water and treats it through various treatment technologies, including redundant reverse osmosis units and electro deionization, for distribution throughout the campus.

A Large Church in Minneapolis, MN – With an expansion of their facility, required to keep up with their growing congregation, and a strong desire to be good stewards of the environment, the church wanted to include “green” technologies within their facility to practice what they preached. WCC assisted the engineers, architects, and owner early on in the design phases of the project, to explore the available options based on the site/installation conditions. WCC and the engineers came up with a simple yet effective way to reclaim rainwater off of their roof, collect it in storage tanks, and reuse it for irrigation and fixture flushing in the new expansion of the facility.

TESTIMONIAL

“One strength of the Horner controllers, not utilized above, is communications. Horner simplifies data exchange between other Horner controllers or third-party devices. They have a long list of downloadable protocols, but the Protocol Configuration makes communication simple and effective. In my experience, this has proved invaluable in multi-controller systems. Native Modbus, Horner handles read/write transactions (not part of the Modbus Protocol) with the click of a button!

Horner’s all-in-one design allows us to produce a polished user interface experience for custom applications. Last, but not least, their tech support is always willing to lend an ear.”

~ Mark D. Nightingale, Water Control Corporation, Ramsey, MN