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Local Invention Saving Art Museum Significant Money & Water
Posted: Sep 14, 2011 12:37 PM by Janine Reyes - jreyes@kristv.com
Updated: Sep 14, 2011 6:49 PM
CORPUS CHRISTI -- A local company has developed a new system that is saving commercial buildings thousands of gallons of water each month.
The green system not only helps the city conserve water, but it equals a savings of at least hundreds of dollars a month.
Through collaboration the TAMUCC, RHM Chemical installed a test system at the Art Museum of South Texas.
"Everybody down here in South Texas is out of water, everybody west of the Mississippi is out of water," Rick Maxey of RHM Chemical, LLC said. That's why he and his business partner JR Matthews designed the cutting edge system 8 years ago.
Now, they're wrapping up 3 months of testing it at the Art Museum of South Texas. A graduate student from Texas A&M Corpus Christi verified the results and found it saves nearly 2,000 gallons of water at the facility each day.
"With an Art Museum, you're running that equipment 24/7 because you're trying to maintain a consistent temperature and humidity for the art work as well as for our visitors," Art Museum Director Joe Schenk explained.
The innovative system takes the museum's water through a complicated process, but allows the cooling system to re-use the water 10 times. Other systems only recycle water about 3 times. In more complicated systems, Maxey told us, they can reuse water up to 20 times.
"When we do that we don't have to put any water down the sewer or the drain or a percentage, about 60 percent it saves of water going to the drain," Maxey said.
He showed us a sample of water from the system, and if you look closely, you can see what it does, on the bottom, there are impurities, those impurities are sent to the sewer system. What's left on the top, is reusable water and that's where the savings come in.
"For the Museum, its about $500 a month," Maxey explained, "and in their budget, that's a lot of money."
"Any dollars we can save on operating expenses can really help us on our programming and our art activities for our whole community," Schenk said.
They are in negotiations now with the company to keep the system so that they can continue to see savings.
RHM Chemical is in the process of patenting their new system.
They are reaching out to potential industrial clients now whose savings could amount to hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a month.
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