WATER SYSTEMS
Substantial water savings with fewer blockages
The exclusive UK and Eire distributor for ‘Land & Transport’ applications for a Norwegian-developed vacuum drainage technology that reportedly consumes one-sixth to one-eighth the volume of water during flushing of ‘traditional’ gravity toilets, better draws in and ‘vents away’ pathogens and odours, offers easier, less disruptive installation, and is ‘low maintenance, and less prone to blockage’, is stepping up its targeting of UK hospitals following a successful first UK healthcare installation at Truro’s Royal Cornwall Hospital. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, met up with MD, Andrew Hay, and Sales/Marketing director, Nicky Brown, at Otter Vacuum Systems’ Downton headquarters near Salisbury, to find out more.
Andrew Hay began by explaining that he first came across vacuum sanitation technology some 13 years ago, when he was running a fleet of mobile toilets, principally for use at outdoor events. He explained: “Recognising that I had a good idea for a foldable portable toilet cubicle which could be transported by trailer to site, and then carried by one man to the required location, I investigated the vacuum toilet technologies then available. I knew that vacuum toilets used considerably less water than gravity toilets, and would thus better suit use in remote locations, such as in the middle of a field. After an exhaustive trawl, I concluded that the vacuum sanitation technology from Norwegian sanitary systems specialist, Jets, would best suit the range of compact mobile toilets that I had designed and developed, and which I then hired out, and subsequently also sold, to the ‘top-end’ events market.”
Lack of a UK distributor
While he still sells the ‘Flexiloo’ cubicles and urinals worldwide via a separate company (Flexiloo is effectively now a Jets customer), Andrew Hay explained that in 2006, not long after he first encountered the Norwegian company’s technology, he discovered Jets had no UK/Eire distributor for its vacuum sanitation technology in ‘Land & Transport’ applications. Seeing the considerable UK commercial potential for its use in both mobile and land-based sanitation applications, he and his business associate, Nicky Brown (who he had met not long before), thus travelled to Norway, and met with Jet’s management team at the company’s global headquarters in Hareid on the country’s west coast. The pair returned to the UK shortly after, having convinced the Norwegians that Otter Vacuum Systems should take on this UK distributorship, which it has held ever since.
Today’s Jets vacuum sanitation system is based around a pump device called a Vacuumarator.
Andrew Hay took up the story: “The Flexiloo business continues to prosper, as do sales of Jets vacuum sanitation systems to a variety of markets. One area where, however, until recently, we had perhaps put insufficient focus, has been selling the technology into the buildings market.” One recent high profile project which highlighted the technology’s suitability for buildings saw Otter Vacuum
Systems supply over 600 toilets, urinals, and grey water collection tanks, to Bloomberg’s new European headquarters in London, which opened last October, and is claimed to be one of the world’s ‘greenest’ buildings built to date; it has already been given a BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ award, with a 98.5 per cent
August 2018 Health Estate Journal 45
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