Archify Live: Discover a New Way of Plumbing by Saniflo

Archify Live is our new web series that responds to an increasing demand for virtual learning and networking. Our second session was held on the 6th of May 2021 and was presented by Saniflo. Below is a transcription of the presentation.

Sophie:

Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us for another Archify Live session brought to you by Archify and Saniflo. I'm very pleased to introduce you to our speaker today, Nick Moore, from Saniflo. He'll be taking you through our session today. Nick, whenever you're ready.

Nick:

Thanks for that Sophie. I just want to introduce to you to the Saniflo SFA Group. We are a French company who invented, back in 1958, the Small-Bore Macerator Pump. What these products basically allow you to do is to have plumbing fixtures where you don't have easy access to drainage.

All of our products are still manufactured in France. We have a small manufacturing plant where these are specifically made just to the north west, I think it is, of Paris. We've been in Australia since 1988. And as a reputable company, we won't sell anything here that isn't watermarked. All of our products are available through the normal plumbing supply outlets and hardware outlets all through Australia and in New Zealand.

We have more than 60 distributors, over 200 products with more than 1000 collaborators around the world. We’ve sold more than 8 million devices today. So you know, that's a very large quantity. And we know we've got it right

We have three products that we sell, we call these families. So the Small-Bore Macerator is where we started our journey. And basically what this does is if you can imagine you want to put an ensuite, somewhere where you don't have access to drainage, it could be a refurbishment in a commercial office, it could be an additional ensuite that you're putting into an old brick and tile three bedroom, one bathroom type house. You can connect, you can see on the little box there to the right, a toilet to the front of it. And on either side, there is an inlet for a basin and for a shower.

The idea behind this is that there are blades inside there. So when the waste goes into the macerator box from the toilet, the water levels rise inside the pump, the blades kick in and they macerate it, they chop it up, they dilacerate it and then it gets pumped out through a small bore; a pipe. So instead of needing 100 millimeter diameter pipe to take your waste away, this actually pumps through a 20 millimeter PVC pressure pipe. And most commonly what would happen is that that waste is lifted up into the ceiling space in the 25 millimeter PVC pressure and then it's directed towards where you do have an existing drain. So then all of that waste will be taken away quite simply and quite easily.

Domestically, these macerators are also very quiet. It's usually a question we get asked, and I'm probably pre-empting somebody's questions but that macerator would probably run around about 43-46 decibels. Our conversations face to face are generally around 60 decibels. So that takes care of the Small-Bore Macerators and we do these in both domestic and commercial.

From the macerator we also developed a Grey Water Pump. So the Grey Water Pumps are probably our most popular kind of pump. These might go under a sink quite suitable for office kitchenettes. Refurb offices is the most common type of setup. Outdoor kitchens, Alfresco type setups, these are all growing in popularity. And rather than, in say an outdoor kitchen out near the barbecue, rather than the waste from the sink just dropping to the ground, you feed it into the small bore grey water pump. And similar to the Macerator, peak discharges in small bore discharge pipes at 25 millimeter PVC pressure. Available in both domestic and commercial. And as you go up through that commercial type setup, it increases the temperature that can be taken, it increases the volume of waste that can be taken away, it will pump higher, and it'll pump further. Both domestically on the Macerators and Grey Water Pumps, they can pump to a maximum of five meters. So when I say pump up into the ceiling space, generally you're looking two and a half to three meters. And then you still have more pumping power then to discharge it across to your existing sewer point.

When you have more commercial type applications, then you may be looking into the lifting stations. So we have two types of lifting stations. The one on the bottom left here is a Sanicubic. That's got two motors, so this can discharge up to round about 360 liters per minute, is quite a powerful pump with twin 1500 watt motors.

In some installations out in Western Queensland, for example, in some of the mining sites out through there, we run nine ensuites into this pump.

Conventionally, and most of our product brochures will indicate, that you should lift before you run horizontally. With all of our pumps, there are formulas that we can apply. And in those mining camps, this Sanicubic was able to pump 17 meters on ground. And then at the end of that 70 meter run was able to leave three meters to deposit the waste into above ground storage tanks. So we can adapt and we can provide design assistance, depending on your kind of application. The Sanicom on the bottom right of the picture there is a Gray Water Pump. There's no blades inside, there's no openings to be able to run a toilet. So this will be used in commercial kitchens, cafes, restaurants, bars, pubs, clubs.

And because of its external moating, you can see through there, those aluminium things, this can take waste water right through to 90 degree Celsius. So in those commercial kitchens, where you've got the dishwashers, the combi ovens, the glass washes, and so on, it can take those higher temperatures,

These units can also lift much higher. So when we spoke of, you know, five meter lift on those domestic products, these products can generally lift up into the vacinity of round about 11 meters. So you've got that much more power to be able to lift and push that waste away.

So you might commonly asked when, where and why might I use these kinds of products. 

So we put together a few case studies of where we've actually done these sorts of things. So we've done a dental clinic at Castle towers in New South Wales. In Queensland, where I'm based, we've also done at least another four other dental clinics where we've been able to assist in the design and the application of these products so that a specific space could be utilized.

So the one on the Gold Coast, for example, had previously been used as an office type setup with very limited drainage needed. So we were able to outfit that and utilise that space by the pumps for the numbers of chairs that might need to be installed, disinfection type procedures with the Enclave type units, additional toilet and public toilet facilities. So here for example, in this setup, they were looking to try and create it in an office and retail space. Not enough adequate drainage. They can't necessarily core drill through some floors based on the type of reinforcing material that might be through there. And then obviously, disruption to other tenants and tenancies that might prevent this sort of thing happening. The project manager came across Saniflo and was able to utilise the Sanispeed in some areas and the Sanicom for the Enclave type, disinfection setup based on the temperature that would go through those areas.

The Sanispeed would be put under the different sinks, under cupboards, it’s small and compact, and this as you can see has been installed with an alarm and whilst it looks a little bit dodgy on the picture, we've recently introduced our own alarm, which is why we've got the dodgy picture looking through there. These alarms have been set up that they can in the event of the pump failure, which is quite rare if it's a Saniflo. But in the event of a pump failure if the water level rises and the pump doesn't engage, the alarm goes off, audibly - puts out an 80 decibel alarm, but will also shut down the water that is feeding all of the fixtures to the pump. And it can also shut down a dishwasher. So, five o'clock on a Friday afternoon somebody hits the dishwasher. If there is a pump failure, you don't want to have flooding. The interlock alarm will just shut everything down all of the water and the power and nothing will turn back on until it's all being reset and fixed up by the plumber.

The Sanispeed lifts to seven meters, it can pump away up to 70 meters and can take water right through the 75 degrees, it's just perfect for those kitchenettes that might go through there.

The Sanicom, as we mentioned, for the Enclave type units, goes right through to 90 degrees as a normal operating temperature and where we say for short periods, that's generally the cycles of washing machines, dishwashers, glass washers, so it can take that through, this one has an ability to pump to a maximum of eight meters and can pump up to 100 meters away. It can also probably take up to about 160 liters of water per minute, so you're going to get quite a good discharge rate which allows multiple fixtures to be connected through to it.

This is the alarm that I mentioned to you just before. This works on a magnetic float. You can see that the float moves up and down, if the water hits it, it pushes it up, which activates everything. It’s quite often specified for office fit outs and refurbs. It can be also connected to the BMS systems. It's quite a handy addition to the pump range.

And this shows you that typical installation, so you can see just underneath the sink, where you've got all your mains water feeding into, you know, your dishwasher inlet and up through your sink, that's where your solenoid is, and if the alarms go off, it isolates the water at that particular point. And the dishwasher is plugged into the bottom of the alarm. So once again, once the alarm goes off, isolates the power to the dishwasher and isolates the water to all of the fixtures.

Some other areas where Saniflo can be used: We have been converting existing spaces that might have been otherwise designated into say childcare centers. So when you start looking at childcare centers, I think there's a formula, I think it's four toilets per 20 children or something along that vicinity. So you can imagine the numbers of toilets that might be needed to prevent any panic from the children and their carers at that particular point in time.

If you wanted to convert a whole floor of a high rise building, which is more and more becoming common within the inner city areas, people work and they take their kids in, they can drop them off at the day-care inside the building go to work pick them up at the end of day.

We were able to utilise three different products through here. So we used the Sanispeed that would go underneath some of the sinks. The Macerator and Saniaccess 2 would go behind each of the toilets. And within this kind of space, if you've got 80 kids going in, then obviously you're going to have 20 of these Saniaccess2’s behind each of these toilets. Sanicom have being used in the food preparation areas, the dishwashers for the higher temperatures that they might have had in place will all come back in through there.

So you can see through here, what we've done is, we've put the SaniAccess (on the bottom right picture) inside of the wall cavity. The system is attached to a removable panel so that everything can come off. And if we need to do any servicing on the Macerator, it's easily accessible to be able to do that. One of the benefits of the access is that with three screws you're into an area where you can remove any blockages. Like any toilet, there's only three things that should ever go down there. We call it the three P's: It’s Poo, Pee and Paper. There shouldn't be anything else that goes down any toilet. And also with a macerator around them like this. There are blades inside and if things go in that shouldn't such as a kid's toy, sanitary products, a toilet duck, they all have the possibility of jamming up the blades. So with the access range, three screws get you into the basket to easily remove any blockages which could be possibly more common in a childcare center. And rather than using a lifting station that I described earlier for the mine camps, it was decided that if we were hooking up multiple toilets to a lifting station, and one was to fail, then the problem is really accentuated because you lose a whole bank of toilets, it's better to lose one toilet, in this kind of circumstance to a blockage than losing a whole Bank of them and creating quite a scene within the childcare center for the carers and the kids.

We use the semi calm in the kitchen, higher temperatures, incoming waste, along with a bit of greasy waste that was able to be dispatched, back out and through. High temperatures right through to 90 degrees, as we mentioned earlier, 750 watt motor, eight meter maximum head. It's quite a capable, reliable pump.

There's been an upgrade done to this, it actually gets released next week. And I don't have the full details of what we've done. But there have been some significant improvements. We hope to be releasing the information and we're having an internal training session on this next Tuesday. So we can fully acquaint ourselves with the new improved model of the Sanicom.

Another interesting area where the Saniflo products have been used, and especially for Architects, once again, utilizing space, is within end of trip facilities. 

So this was done at the Monash University Conference Center in Melbourne, Victoria. And the idea behind this is that they had an area there that needed to be converted to an end of trip facility. An end of trip facility for those of you who may not know, and I hope I'm not being too condescending, it provides facilities for cyclists, and walkers and runners in the inner city areas. They run or ride or walk to work and they need to be showered before they go on up. This is the end of trip facilities. So with the products that we've utilized here, we use the Sanifloor. So there was no way that we could get core drill through, we needed to have flat areas. So this particular pump actually sucks the waste from a shower. And when it sucks it, it means that the pump itself can sit up to three meters away from the actual waste itself. So that could sit away from it, it will suck the waste away. And as it sucks it pumped all at the same time to be able to get it all away.

You will find if you go through to a lot of your local service stations where they may have introduced coffee machines, that up until probably four or five years ago, both coffee machines were just dropping their waste into buckets underneath the coffee machine inside the cupboard. This proved to be unhealthy, smelly, and many stores have actually taken the lead in putting in these styles of pumps. 

So 711, Coles Express, Woolworths, Puma, quite a number of them have started to put these in. So next time you're in an older style 711, if you opened up a cupboard, you would probably see a Sanipeed unit sitting in there. It made it a much more efficient process of dispensing the waste that would come through there. Some of the larger service stations actually have two machines and what happens with these units is that every time they make a coffee, they basically put a flush through. Each flush can do six liters. So if there's a couple of coffee machines, they've moved up to the Sanicom unit to allow for that higher cycling that goes through it.

Throughout the past 12 months or so with the shutdown, we've created a number of exclusive websites. So we've created one exclusively for plumbers, we've created another one exclusively for our resellers that focus specifically on their needs in terms of additional information over and above what might be on our normal website.

For designers, architects and hydraulic consultants, what we've done is created a designer hub which very closely mirrors our normal website. For our new and exclusive websites, we've created a new menu which gives more technical information that may assist you with your unit selection, with advice, in terms of what you might need to know. It gives you information on the new and upcoming products that we've got on the range. There's also access to our full Saniflo catalog. This is a 'page turn' type setup. So when you go into there it will actually show you how to read the catalog. It'll provide you with a series of questions that you might need to ask yourself about your project. What do I need to know? What should I be looking at in terms of trying to select the pump? How high does it have to push? What fixtures need to go into it? What's the temperature rating of some of those fixtures? Then there’s an easy click-through to the individual products. There's also BIM files available for each of the products that you can utilise for your projects. There's also information about getting in touch with us for further information, project assistance, design etc. We're quite happy to help you through wherever we can.

There's also a range of case studies that we've just spoken about. I think we've got 12 or 14 case studies on the website.

We are also releasing inground pump chambers. So overseas, we took over a company in Germany called Zehnder Pumpen about two years ago now. And we started to integrate some of their more powerful products into the work that we do here. And included in this is the significant inground pump stations that can pump up to 20 to 30 meter head type setup. So for those sites where you may find yourself below street level main sewer lines, rather than having to put the house on stumps, so you’ve got a gravity feed or using inferior products, you can rely on Saniflo to be able to provide you with an inground pump station that will actually pump back up to street level. These pump stations can be quite large, anything up to, two and a half 5000 liter tanks with twin pumps, backup motors, fully alarmed, big control panels that will tell you everything that's going on with the pump. We've actually put one on the Gold Coast, just before Christmas, that was put in as a trial unit and it's performing wonderfully.

Within this designer hub. there's also some quick guides in terms of venting of the pumps, the temperature ratings, the kind of pipe sizes that you might need to use. It discusses hair traps, if you're looking at converting a space for a hairdressing salon or a beauty salon, so we speak of hair traps and the need for them within those particular areas. We don't normally have issues with hair in our pumps. But if you are looking at putting in a hairdressing salon, the chemicals that are used quite often in those areas can act as a bonding agent on the hair. And they form sort of like lumps inside the base of the pump, which can interfere with the activation or the discharge of the waste.

The other new part on this designer hub is that we created a project parameters calculator. And when you click on that, you get asked a whole series of questions about your project, in terms of what fixtures need to be put into it, how far away is the existing sewer point, maybe something to do with temperatures, but a whole series of questions. Once we've received that information it gets sent to your local Saniflo business development manager who will then give you a call to discuss the project and make the proper product selection. We just want to make sure that you're getting the right product in the right place so that you're getting the best solution for your particular project.

Some of the new products that we've brought through - so this is on the market at the moment is a product called Sanifast. This is another undersink style unit. But what this has got over say, Sanispeed, is additional height. So this can take right through to 10 meter maximum head. It has a larger tank capacity, that alarm that I discussed with you earlier, it can actually be connected to this pump simply by plug and play. It comes supplied with a plug in point on the pump itself that connects it to the alarm, so there's no need for an electrician to come through and actually wire up the solenoid valve on that setup. This has a built in carbon block filter, which is used to assist in reduction of any odors that may emanate from the pump, it can also run right through to 90 degrees Celsius. And it's a very easy serviced type unit because the discharge comes out through the side of the pump not through the lid. Four clips and the lids off if you have any issues inside or it needs to be cleaned out. So it's a very, very well thought out pump. And this came from our association with the German Zehnder Pumpen as I mentioned earlier. So it's a really good pump and very, very well positioned in the price range of our pump selections.

This was the inground pump stations that I mentioned a little bit earlier. We started off with a little one that might be suitable for a granny flat if it needs to go in ground. Those cubic units on the lifting stations we find that those are quite a good alternative also for a granny flat type situation. We have a single motor version of that Sanicubic which is ideal. The Sanifos 610 is single dwelling, single motor, and then we come into the twin motor pumps and the 1300 size and then the 1000 plus so we can go into 1000, 2000, 3000 and so on.

We've also, with the assistance of Archify, designed a couple of CPD presentations. So these are available to you. We can come to your practice to deliver the presentation or they are available online via Archify Education.

The presentations we have are: ‘Discovering a new way of plumbing’ where we speak quite specifically about some of the constraints that you may encounter through your project work and the alternate solutions that are available to you. It really starts to highlight some of the reasons why you might need to be using the Saniflo product. And then we have the 'Lifting Stations' CPD which focuses specifically on lifting stations. So those are both available to you. You can reach out to Sophie or myself and we are quite happy to organize a CPB presentation for you.

Sophie:

We will have that 'Lifting Stations' session available on Archify Education, which is our online CPD platform and that should be going live within the next week. So please keep an eye out for that if you wanted to continue to learn from Saniflo.

Thank you so much, Nick, and Saniflo for presenting the session today. It was very informative. And thank you all so much for joining us as well. We really appreciate you taking time out of your day to come and learn from Saniflo and from Archify. Thank you so much for attending. We'll be in touch after today's session, enjoy the rest of your afternoon and we'll hopefully see you in our next Archify Live session.

Nick:

Thank you, everybody.