Introduction
Earlier this year, The Cope Company’s AUTOBrine® team completed a challenging installation of an automatic brine system at a healthcare facility. Keep reading to find out how our team overcame the obstacles, and successfully completed this AUTOBrine® installation to ultimately help the customer conserve storage space and eliminate the task of manually loading over 100 tons of salt per year!
The Customer
This AUTOBrine® customer, a renowned healthcare institution in Baltimore, Maryland, operates a cogen plant that produces energy and steam for its hospital campus. Before AUTOBrine®, the plant’s water treatment equipment utilized over 120 tons of water conditioning salt each year. Storing the pallets of salt was very inconvenient, as it took up valuable space and often blocked and obstructed the building’s walkways. Additionally, employees spent several hours per day in the winter months 
manually moving and loading water conditioning salt for their water softeners. The facility was spending over $25,000 a year in labor cost to manage salt handling logistics.
The Challenges
For AUTOBrine®, this project created the challenge of locating an area for brine tanks in an urban environment. Due to the surrounding area, putting a brine making tank in-ground was not an option for this customer, and usable space for an above-ground tank was very limited. However, The Cope Company was able to utilize space in an alley adjacent to the hospital’s energy plant and construct a liquid brine delivery system with enough capacity to meet the salt volume needs. Cope utilized multiple cross-linked bulk storage tanks, installed several hundred feet of plumbing, and installed controls that automatically deliver the brine to the water treatment system as needed. The system is also equipped with a monitor that sends out an alert when more brine is needed to be delivered to the system.
The Outcome
Since the completion of the AUTOBrine® installation, the facility has freed up the storage space once used to store pallets of salt. Better yet, employees will no longer be required to store and break down over 95 pallets of salt bags per year, physically move the bags of salt through the facility to where the water softeners are located, and manually lift, load, and dispose of more than 4,750 heavy bags of salt per year. The AUTOBrine® system is saving this client up to $30,000 in operational cost annually, and it’s eliminating the risk of potential injuries (along with lost time and workers comp) from repetitively handling the 50-pound bags of salt. Now, the facility receives bulk brine delivered to their AUTOBrine® system, which is also helping to reduce the facility’s carbon footprint by eliminating the disposal of pallets, pallet wrap, and plastic bags that the salt was previously packaged in.
All in all, the customer is very pleased with how the install went, and the staff is ecstatic to be done with storing and manually handling all of the heavy bags of salt.