To Heat Or Not To Heat Is The Question

... with the introduction of ever increasing requirements specified within ANSI.Z358.1-2009 for the provision of 15 minutes tepid water drench time for all emergency showers.

However, with safety officers and purchasing / facility managers mindful of the fact that it is no longer an option to provide their workforce with safety showers that omit cold water direct from the mains, it can be difficult to make the right decision about what safety equipment they actually need for purpose. Here we explain what we can provide that meet current standards.

An emergency safety shower is a piece of equipment that until recently was regarded by business and industry as an afterthought. A safety shower might stand unused for weeks, months or even years, apart from its weekly test which hardly makes it the most vital piece of equipment on a large industrial plant; that is until there’s an emergency, and then it becomes the most invaluable piece of equipment on site. If you’re the person who has just been sprayed with concentrated acid, you want to know the emergency shower is going to do its job perfectly, first time every time without exacerbating the problem further.

Improvements in Health & Safety awareness, duty of care to employees and increasingly extreme environmental conditions in which an operative has to work mean that more thought than ever before has to go into safety shower purchasing decisions.

Many COSHH sheets state the requirement for a casualty to remain under a shower for at least 15 minutes for hard to shift chemical contaminants such as caustic soda to be washed off satisfactorily. The necessity to therefore provide 15 minutes or more of tepid water is absolutely vital in order to minimise premature cessation of decontamination due to thermal shock.

So water access / storage, available space, the costs of heating large volumes of water, the cost of installing and running inline instantaneous water heaters and the environment in which a safety shower will be sited are all points that need to be considered in order to be able to specify what will be the most effective piece of equipment.

Our ‘tank’ showers are possibly the most effective solution to ensure tepid water is guaranteed as by the very nature of being able to store water means operationally they are not affected by water or power failures. Regardless of ambient or incoming water temperatures these showers will deliver a guaranteed 15 minutes of tepid water at 76 litres per minute as recommended by ANSI because the stored water can be effectively managed. We use heating methods so that our tank showers are operable in temperatures down to minus 40 degrees C. Equally the method of us applying a ‘chiller’ to the tank enables safe use in temperatures up to plus 40 degrees C.

If there is access to suitable mains water providing the correct flow rates then our ‘mains-fed’ safety shower can be installed, however this sort of equipment will not deliver tepid water (a common misconception) and must therefore be connected to a tepid water supply.

Add to this our safety shower system that doesn’t store water in the pipe work and is completely self-draining, then you have a piece of equipment that is more energy efficient and resistant to corrosion. And if it doesn’t hold any water at all then it can’t ever freeze or overheat so this is ideal for any environment.

If the workforce is always on the move, our self contained bowser/mobile shower is available that are supplied with its own power source to give the stipulated 15 minutes of tepid water.

So, whilst it may look daunting having to make the right choices to meet current standards, we provide safety drenching equipment that goes above and beyond what is recommended in order to make the right purchasing decision as easy as possible. Our motto is a ‘safety shower is for life, not for luxury’.