The pulp and paper mill industries use a lot of water in their manufacturing processes and generate huge amounts of wastewater in the process. Wastewater recycling is fast becoming a necessity to cut energy costs, reduce clean water usage, improve overall efficiency, and reduce hazardous environmental waste.

Excess water used in the production processes of these paper mills drains into large underground sump pits. The water is collected, treated and reused again. Process water flows into these pits at a high rate and when the pit fills up the wastewater needs to be pumped out for treatment and processing. Controlling the pumps in these pits is critical to the treatment process,  keeping wastewater from overflowing into work areas which is dangerous and can cause significant damage and down time.

The sump pumps are controlled using float switches. All to often low cost sump pump float switches are chosen. These sump pump style float switches are ball shaped floats on the end of a cord that are tethered off to a pipe. The float is free to swing up and down in the pit to control the pump. The problem is that rushing  water into these pits generates a lot of turbulence causing the floats to get tangled and smash on the concrete walls eventually causing them to fail.

Using a rugged vertical multilevel float switch that is constructed out of ridged stainless steel tubing solves this problem.  These vertical float switches are bracket mounted to the side of the concrete pit. The floats only move vertically on the shaft. These multilevel floats can have up to five individual float positions not only for pump control but also for low level alarms, high level alarms, and emergency shut down. The sensors are made to order, the liquid level switch points and sensor lengths are fully customizable to any size water sump pit.

Using a multilevel float switch instead of a sump pump float in paper mill and pulp wastewater sump pits can save companies a lot of time, money, and energy, keeping systems up and running.