Ready to modernise: helping drinking water hygiene in schools with SCHELL SWS

7-minute read

Modern school buildings with up-to-date technology are still rather thin on the ground in Germany. Many schools and educational establishments are still housed in buildings built in the 50s, 60s and 70s. In terms of maintaining drinking water hygiene, these buildings present a number of major challenges – but these can be resolved using SCHELL’s innovative, digital Water Management System SWS. The upcoming six-week summer holidays offer an ideal period of time to complete modernisation work. Thanks to SCHELL SWS, this work can be planned and executed without any time-consuming chasing out work.

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Simulating normal operation with SCHELL SWS

Equipping schools with a water management system can be hugely beneficial when it comes to maintaining drinking water hygiene. With their extended holidays, educational establishments regularly experience long periods of time where levels of use are far below normal. These ‘shutdowns’ endanger drinking water quality. To avoid time-consuming procedures for recommissioning the system at the end of the holidays, a complete exchange of water must be triggered throughout the entire piping system every 72 hours at the latest. This prevents harmful bacteria normally present in the water from reaching levels considered critical. While the water exchange can be initiated manually, this is time-consuming: automated stagnation flushes are a much quicker and less expensive option. With a water management system like the one from SCHELL, the necessary stagnation flushes can be programmed precisely and centrally.

Efficiency and saving water with SWS

SWS networks the electronic SCHELL fittings in a building with a server, so that all settings – such as stagnation flushes on particular days or at particular times – can be configured centrally. This saves time and is very convenient. SWS also offers the option of assigning fittings to groups. This triggers a stagnation flush across different fittings at exactly the same, preconfigured point in time. This means that specified normal operation can be simulated for the installation, which effectively avoids any ‘shutdowns’. Assigning fittings to groups has the decisive advantage of creating flow velocities that are so high (at least 2 m/s) that they create turbulent flows and therefore flush the piping as effectively as is required. Especially in buildings with large pipe diameters, these ‘concurrencies’ (as they are termed) typically make all the difference for drinking water hygiene. At the same time, automated flushes are more precise and economical than manual flushes, since exactly enough water – no more, no less – flows through the system. SWS also logs every single flush operation, providing operators with a record of their efforts to maintain drinking water quality.

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Next-level comfort with SMART.SWS

Water management gets even more convenient when SWS is extended with the SMART.SWS online service. This is particularly true if facility managers need to keep track of multiple properties. Such as schools that have old and new buildings or even entire building complexes that house different types of schools. Thanks to SMART.SWS, fittings parameters can be checked and adjusted as needed using a browser-based portal from anywhere in the world. Maintenance work like battery changes, for example, can also be efficiently and cost-effectively planned.

SWS drives modernisation with flexible networking

A major benefit of the SWS solution is that it offers the choice of wireless and/or wired networking. This flexibility saves building materials, personnel costs and time on renovation projects. Conversions also avoid expensive wall-chasing work, since battery-operated electronic SCHELL fittings are available and SWS components can be networked wirelessly. Designed as a modular system, SWS can be extended whenever needed. With two new products added to the portfolio – the GRANDIS E kitchen tap and the MONTUS Flow cistern module – kitchen taps in the cafeteria can now be integrated, for example, as can the toilets.

SWS is the solution

Whatever the challenges to drinking water hygiene faced in a school building or in day-to-day school life, SWS (optionally with SMART.SWS) provides an efficient solution. SCHELL also covers all of the relevant points of use in schools. In older school buildings in particular, there are many points of use – from the tea point or janitor’s room to wash basins in classrooms. All of these need to be used or flushed regularly in order to maintain good drinking water hygiene. Thanks to SCHELL, network-ready fittings can be installed everywhere here and controlled intelligently with SWS. Together, SWS and automated stagnation flushes offer optimum support for protecting water quality – and therefore the health of the pupils attending the school.

To find out more about how electronic SCHELL fittings improve user hygiene all on their own, check out part 1 of our post on hygiene in schools.