PORT ANGELES — The Port Angeles City Council has approved the purchase of a sodium hypochlorite generation system that will treat the municipal water supply and reduce long-term costs.
Council members voted unanimously last week to ink a $151,104 contract with TMG Services of Tacoma for the purchase and installation of the equipment at the Port Angeles Water Treatment Plant.
The original sodium hypochlorite generation system, which the city installed in 2012, failed in late July, Port Angeles Public Works and Utilities Director Thomas Hunter told the City Council on Tuesday.
“Essentially, we’ve just been batching in barrels of chlorine and mixing it in a very archaic or caveman-like process,” Hunter said.
“If we don’t move forward with this replacement, we will easily go over the replacement cost just in bringing that chlorine in by those 55-gallon drums.”
Port Angeles uses filtration and disinfection to treat potable water, which comes from a well near the Elwha River.
Disinfection is achieved by adding sodium hypochlorite, which can be purchased in a concentrate or generated on site using a salt brine solution and electrolysis, Hunter said in a memo.
On-site generation is less expensive, safer for operations and allows for a large storage capacity than concentrated chlorine, Hunter said.
“Basically, we take electricity, we take salt, we take water, and we mix it all together in this magical box, and it comes out at 0.08 percent chlorine, and that’s the simplest way that I can put it,” Hunter said in the virtual council meeting.
Hunter said it would be “far cheaper” to replace the broken hypochlorite system with a new system that uses inexpensive electrolyzer cells.
He estimated the new system would have a 25-year lifespan, with cell replacement every five to eight years.
One cell replacement on the old system cost about $20,000 compared with $1,200 to $1,800 for one cell on the new system, Hunter said.
Water utilities in Seattle, Tacoma, Edmonds and Everett have moved to the new technology, Hunter said.
“These systems are very hard to come by relative to lead times right now with everything that’s going on with our economy and COVID, and so it’s incredibly important relative to us saving money that we move forward because there’s a limited amount of these systems that are already produced,” Hunter said.
The engineer’s estimate on the new sodium hypochlorite generation system was $135,000.
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at rollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
