Amarinth Enables East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust to Make Cost Saving

A condensate recovery unit (CRU) is a proven way to reduce energy costs as it collects hot condensate from the steam system and returns it back to the boiler plant to be used as boiler feed. Most NHS hospitals have installed such systems and in many cases these were commissioned over 20 years ago and in those cases the Girdlestone pumps most of these CRUs use are nearing the end of their working lives.

When Girdletone pumps ceased trading over a decade ago, Amarinth started providing high-quality spares to prolong the life of these critical pumps but with NHS Trusts now being told by some suppliers that the whole of the CRU and pump system must be replaced at great expense as the CRU pumps reach their end of life, Amarinth has stepped in to deliver a cost saving lifeline to NHS Trusts.

In most cases the CRUs and associated pipework and systems are sound and so Amarinth is providing new plug-and-play pumps incorporating the latest technologies for optimum reliability and efficiency to replace the old Girdlestone units without any modification being required to pipework or baseplates. The cost savings of this are significant, for example, East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust, which has just installed these new pumps, estimated savings of over 80% compared to what they were quoted by other suppliers and it now has a system with another 20+ years of life.

With over 2,000 NHS Hospitals across the United Kingdom the potential saving for the NHS as a whole from the Amarinth plug-and-play CRU pumps is enormous, and in addition to their increased reliability and efficiency, the upgraded pumps will reduce downtime and maintenance costs and have a readily available supply of spare and replacement parts for many years to come.

Oliver Brigginshaw, Managing Director of Amarinth, commented: “The NHS is facing ever-increasing pressure on costs and once we heard about other suppliers proposing to replace the whole of the condensate recovery system in hospitals just because the pumps were at the end of their life and the original supplier, Girdlestone, had ceased trading, we quickly put our engineering team, who already had a lot of knowledge designing and re-engineering replacement parts for Girdlestone pumps, to work on providing this cost-effective and long-term plug-and-play solution. The feedback from East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust on the significant cost saving this solution has delivered has certainly justified our efforts.”