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I had lunch with Dick Reese recently. Many of you may know Dick, as he is something of a legend in the industry and is known for his work in recent times on energy reduction.

Dick and I certainly agree on one thing--if a mill is thinking about adding to their energy generation sources, that is by adding another boiler to their fleet--it is time to pause and take a deep breath. It is one thing if you are changing fuels, quite another if you are just adding to your total steam generation capacity.

What's the biggest waster of heat according to Dick? Pump and agitator seal water. Followed closely by wash-up hoses.

These leaks have been on the list for as long as I have been in the industry. They look small but add up to big costs very quickly. This is particularly true if your mill's water source is fairly cool year around. In some places the water temperature never rises about 55F (13C). If your process temperature is around 120F (49C), every bit of water you use, even seal water, will reach this temperature. If you are discharging at 80F (27C), or worse yet, expending even more energy in a cooling tower to lower the temperature further on your discharge stream, the losses are stunning.

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If a million gallons (3.78 million liters) of water a day passes through your mill with an incoming temperature of 55F and a discharge temperature of 80F you are throwing away 208 million Btu's (52.5 x 106 Kcal).

So you say, OK, Jim, a million gallons is a lot of water. Well, it is less than 7 gallons a minute from 100 sources. I suspect your mill has more than 100 sources.

You are losing this a drip at a time through seals and hoses. Take a stop watch and a five gallon bucket and take a walk. Pick up a running hose and put it in the bucket and time how long it takes to fill it. Then do the math from that one data point.

Dick reminded me of the compounding problems we often see in this area. The seal is leaking around a press pit pulper agitator. There stands a fourth hand with a water hose cleaning up the stock leak from the agitator and flushing it into the U-drain. Wonderful.

These matters fall into the category of issues we talk about often here. Those issues are these: employees in a mill walk by situations every day that they are so used to seeing that they take no action. Only when an outsider comes in and shows them what waste is going on, do they do anything about it. Then, a couple of years later, one has to go through the exercise all over again.

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Many of these energy wasters are in places that sadly are often only seen by employees at the lowest level in the hierarchy. They are usually the greenest employees on site and they have no comprehension of what an outstanding operation should look like.

Of course, this is all management's fault. First, management should be making rounds at least once per day to the deepest, darkest most remote corners of the mill and observing these situations themselves. Secondly, they should be making sure that entry level employees understand what standard levels of operation are expected. And finally, they should make sure there is a system in place that will allow even the newest employee to raise their hand and point out conditions that need correcting.

What do you think? Do you see any things from this column that need correcting in your mill? Take our quiz this week and let us know.

For safety this week, leaky, wet conditions create opportunities for slips and falls. Yet another reason to work on your seals and hoses.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

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