Gouge Linen, Reliability and Energy Savings
The Customer
Since 1989, Gouge Linen has been a family-owned and operated commercial laundry & industry leader. Gouge provides linen and garment services to businesses throughout Victoria and country New South Wales.
The Need
The linen & garments service providers use steam ironers as part of their process to ensure an optimum quality and result. The steam ironers use a minimum of 9 barg (180C) of steam for them to run. Based on the facility, there could be in the range of 2 to 6 ironers on site. Each ironer, uses a large volume of steam and all the high-pressure condensate from the ironers is sent directly to the feedwater tank. This almost always leads to the feedwater tank overheating, boiling and venting aggressively through its discharge. A large amount of energy can be lost this way, and accounts for about 10% of boiler fuel.
The Engineered Solution
GOUGE approached Energy Specialties to design a turnkey solution to extract the waste flash steam & water, improve reliability and reduce the boiler fuel demand. This resulted in a bespoke Flash Recovery Package. The package which also included a shell-and-tube heat exchanger was designed with a PLC & HMI, pressure transmitter and temperature transmitters for optimising and measuring the energy recovery. We included a display to show the daily saving and datalogging capability as well as displaying the real time temperature increase of the boiler feed water through the recovery package. This improves Gouge’s case to extract maximum government funding available for reducing natural gas consumption.
The Result
The high-pressure condensate from the ironers now goes through the recovery package, and all the flash steam is extracted from the condensate to preheat the boiler feedwater after the feedwater pumps. The feedwater tank temperature is now under control and diverts all the heat to the boiler. Gouge is benefiting by saving 8-10% of the boiler fuel. Furthermore, this project has fallen under the VEECS government incentive, and Gouge receives a significant number of VEEC certificates , current value $80 per certificate, and the ROI timescale is extremely short.
