Water Environment Federation

The 2019 Operator Ingenuity Award was given to Senior Plant Operator James Petalio for reconfiguring the District’s chlorine analyzers.
From the Water Environment Federation website:
This award goes to James Petalio of the Rodeo Sanitary District (Rodeo, Calif.) who was dealing with constant chlorine dosing alarms after hours. The alarms triggered the facility’s sodium bisulfite metering pump to run at 100% automatically to prevent a chlorine violation. The problem was solved by simply raising reagent bottles (acetate and potassium iodide buffer solution) from below the chlorine analyzer unit to above it. Removing the need for the reagent dosing pump to overcome the head of lifting reagents up to the analyzer stabilized the process and eliminated the alarms. This straightforward fix saved the district $1,200 in overtime costs and more than $12,800 per year in sodium bisulfite costs.