SOLUTIONS CENTRAL | December 2021 | mrfpr.com/blog
Watch our webinar focusing on tips and best practices for designing and installing a fuel oil handling system for hurricanes or other disaster preparedness. If your application is on an island, coastline, or another place that has frequent extreme weather or natural disasters, you want to have a game plan for worst case scenarios. This is something that codes and regulations will often also require.
Lessons learned preparing your Fuel Oil System for hurricane season
No official design at all, assign an expert to review the operating control logic and sizing.
No long term testing of how all the system components will behave, only 15 min exercise is not representative.
Many in PR normally uses FO#2 as boiler fuel also, now that genset is also requiring FO#2, the system is now overloaded.
Many hospitals ran out of fuel, main tank not large enough. Nobody thought these events could last this long.
Equipment undersizing and subsequent emergency style sourcing. Equipment redundancy, many single pump system.
Sludge & Bacteria borne corrosion. Some users have switched boiler fuel from #2 to LPG. The #2 tank is now oversized and the fuel is not being recycled often, leading to sludge. This is the primary reason to use a Fuel Polishing system.
How much does the facility have invested in 30,000 gallons of fuel? At Puerto Rico prices thats $75,000 worth of fuel that can go bad in a tropical environment.
You could compare the cost of having someone come out and polish the fuel in the tank. I don’t think a portable 120 VAC polisher could move fuel very fast, so I expect a 30,000 gallon tank would take a couple of days to polish with a portable unit.
What is the cost of having the generators down for a couple of days with clogged fuel nozzles until they can get a technician out?