SCHELL SWS Water Management System – optional leakage protection

The SCHELL SWS Water Management System helps facility managers to operate their drinking water installation hygienically. Designed as a modular system, it networks many different kinds of electronic SCHELL fittings and associated products. Coverage is offered for all relevant tapping points: the integrated approach to water management with SWS includes SCHELL fittings for wash basins, kitchens, showers, WCs and urinals. Programming, control and monitoring of the fittings is handled centrally. You can find out more about SWS in the first part of our blog series.

In this article, we introduce you to another component in the SWS tool box: the SWS leak protection fitting helps you to minimise damage to your property in the event of a pipe rupture occurring.

SCHELL’s intelligent leak protection fitting is perfect for meeting this recommendation as it offers protection against leaks. The leak protection fitting adds an extra function to the SCHELL SWS Water Management System to combine hygiene with leak protection.
In traditional facilities where no safety precautions have been taken, damage to piping can result in water slowly leaking out unnoticed into technical rooms or pipe shafts, and causing damage to masonry and property. Potential damage here can be very extensive. If the damage is discovered, the typical approach is to shut off main and branch lines in the system. However, doing this as a precautionary measure before longer periods of absence is not recommended. This is because stagnating water in piping can lead to an excessive concentration of bacteria that are harmful to health and therefore contaminate the entire drinking water installation.
The SWS leak protection fitting is ideal for all buildings with fixed usage or holiday periods – such as councils, local authorities, schools, insurance companies and sports centres. The fitting uses a calendar function to ensure that the drinking water system is always sealed off – either centrally or only in certain parts – when all of the users have left the building. The fitting opens and closes automatically to perform the stagnation flushes set up in the system. The fitting stays shut at all other times. This ensures hygiene and protection are maintained even in the case of longer periods of absence – like long weekends or during school holidays. For unscheduled opening of the fitting, the fitting can be operated with a switch or opened manually.

A key advantage for facility managers results from the particular functionality of the SWS Water Management System when used in conjunction with leak protection fittings: this is because multiple leak protection fittings can be integrated at the same time within SWS. This allows various sections or floors in the building to be supplied individually with water as per requirements. Our application scenario shows how this operates in a real world scenario.

Let’s imagine that we have a three-story office building, with a hair salon on the ground floor, a doctor’s practice on the first floor and a management office on the second floor. All three users have different hours of business and holidays, so the water supply also needs to be regulated individually for each user. Three fittings – one for each storey – enable a made-to-measure water supply that is easily configured on the PC using SWS software. The water supply for the GP is shut off all through the Christmas holidays, for example, while the fitting for the management office is opened from 7 AM to 6 PM between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The hair stylist, who pops into her salon by chance on 25 December, uses her switch to open the fitting for her floor manually and closes it again when she leaves her salon. The stagnation flushes programmed for Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays can take place at 1 AM every day, regardless of these opening times. The three fittings open and close automatically for each flush.

The integration of the leak protection fitting as a component within the SCHELL SWS Water Management System offers key advantages: use of leak protection fittings as part of SWS minimises the risk of property damage from pipes rupturing and leaks of water going unnoticed. Deployment of the leak protection fitting is flexible and can be adapted to building operations – even floor by floor. Use of the leak protection fitting in an installation controlled by SWS increases the level of protection for the building fabric.

In the first part of our blog series on the SCHELL SWS Water Management System, find out more about the modular approach taken by the SCHELL SWS Water Management System.

Have any other questions about combining leak protection with SWS? We look forward to your enquiry and will be happy to advise you!