For an acute care hospital in Eastern Pennsylvania, preparing for a power outage meant looking beyond the equipment at the patient’s bedside. The hospital needed reliable backup power for its central reverse osmosis (RO) water purification system, an essential part of the infrastructure supporting hemodialysis.
The RO system was designed to meet stringent international medical standards for hemodialysis water treatment. Its role was to supply purified water directly to dialysis machines. Without power to that system, the water supply supporting treatment could stop, even if the dialysis machines themselves remained powered.
The hospital turned to Medi-Products to help address this critical dependency.
The Challenge: Maintaining Power to an Essential Water System
Hemodialysis requires specially treated water that meets defined chemical and microbiological quality requirements. Water treatment is therefore an integral part of the care process, with equipment behind the scenes supporting the machines clinicians use every day.
For this hospital, a sudden utility failure would immediately shut down the RO system and interrupt its direct feed of purified water. The backup power requirement was clear: provide power quickly enough to prevent an electrical interruption from shutting down this essential equipment.
Capacity mattered, too. The battery backup system needed to support the RO system’s electrical load for the hospital’s required runtime. Addressing only one of those requirements would leave an important part of the application unresolved.
The Approach: Sizing Backup Power Around the Application
Medi-Products worked with the hospital to determine the appropriate system size based on its load and runtime requirements.
These two factors serve different purposes. The electrical load determines how much power the backup system must deliver to operate the connected equipment. The runtime requirement determines how much stored energy is needed to sustain that operation during an outage.
By considering both, our team helped define a battery backup approach around the hospital’s specific water purification application. The objective was to support continued RO operation when utility power failed, helping protect the supply of purified water on which dialysis treatment depended.
The Takeaway: Include Supporting Infrastructure in Backup Power Planning
This project highlights an important consideration for healthcare facilities: essential care depends on more than the equipment in the treatment room. Central water purification systems can be just as important to operational continuity.
For Medi-Products, the starting point is understanding that dependency, then matching backup power capacity and runtime to the equipment supporting the facility’s patient care needs. Contact a member of our team today for a free power assessment.
System at a Glance
- System: P60-48LA48-208
- Power: 60,000 watts
- Energy capacity: 57.6 kWh
- Phase: Three phase
- Equipment protected: Reverse osmosis water purification system
