Drain trenches are cornerstones of laundry operations. You can’t have a laundry without one or the equivalent thereof. They greatly improve efficiency and accelerate throughput. You don’t want to have paid labor wasting any time getting textiles to the next stage of the production process. Every bit of time you cut from any of the repetitive processes is a bit of time you can apply to producing more laundry. Anything you can do to accelerate a machine’s portion of the process is just as important as streamlining the production process itself.
Your objective is to get the water into and out of the washer as fast as possible with each fill/drain cycle to minimize wasted labor resources. A washer has a 4” or larger drain pipe with the objective of getting the water out fast. Most always a lot faster than a normal drain can handle gravity flow. Therefore, you need a trench/basin located behind the washers large enough to capture this surge of water and allow it to flow down the drain in a typical manner. The trench is sloped and the sewer inlet is located at the low end of the trench. A trench is designed to hold the flow of all the washers at once so you don’t have to worry about the washers flooding your laundry.
If you’re typical day consists of 20 loads or more and a washer may fill and drain 10 times on each load, that’s 200 fill and drain cycles each day. You can see that if you have to wait only 1 minute for each, that’s over 3 hours per day wasted waiting on this basic requirement of washing.
If your laundry needs to go into a building without a trench, you can cut into the concrete and build one or you can elevate your washers and use an above-ground alternative. Manufacturers offer inexpensive and effective plastic or poly drain trenches designed to be placed on the floor. These devices solve the dilemma of what to do when your slab is already poured and it wasn’t designed for a laundry.
Water Energy Green Laundry Systems when installed for optimum results utilize a dual drain trench setup. Each washer will have 2 drains and each drain needs its own drain trench. One trench flows to the city sewer and the other trench is used to capture the water for reuse. This dual setup allows you to program washers to segregate the really dirty wastewater from the rest. Water discharged from the detergent step of a wash formula should drain to the trench connected to the sewer. All the rest of the water should be sent to the second trench or basin and a pump will pick that up and pump it to the water reuse system.
The reason for segregating the wastewater is to maximize the cost/value relationship of our water reuse systems. The dirtiest of laundry wastewater only makes up about 10% of the total water used. A treatment system designed to reclaim this water would cost as much as 10 times more than a system designed to recycle the relatively clean water coming from a typical rinse cycle using a Water Energy Green Laundry System. The cornerstone of our Green Laundry Systems is the use of high levels of dissolved ozone (not the same as high levels of ozone gas) in the wash wheel. Dissolved ozone is known for its powerful water purification abilities in addition to its powerful textile cleaning abilities. Our high levels of dissolved ozone delivered to the wash wheel provide superior textile cleaning and water purification at the same time. This, in addition to eliminating the vast majority of harsh chemicals when you switch to ozone, will provide you with a much higher quality of wastewater that will be much less expensive to recycle.