The Challenge
A municipal pumping station is the kind of infrastructure nobody thinks about until it stops. The station’s large pump motors keep water pressure up for tens of thousands of households — and they run on a grid where outages are a routine part of every week, not an exception.
Restarting big pumps is the hard part: direct-on-line motor starts impose a heavy kVA demand that an undersized genset simply cannot pick up. The utility needed a single standby unit with genuine motor-starting headroom, fully automatic operation with no one standing at a panel, and an engine platform its technicians could keep running for years with parts available in-country.
Our Solution
We configured a 1500kVA standby genset on the Perkins 4012 platform — a V12 with decades of service history in exactly this duty, backed by one of the strongest parts and dealer networks in West Africa. The alternator was sized against the station’s largest pump motor start and the complete unit passed full-load factory testing before shipment.
A Deep Sea automatic mains failure controller monitors the grid and takes over on its own: when supply drops, the unit starts, picks up the pump load in stages, and hands back seamlessly when the mains return.
Motor-starting capability verified against the station’s largest direct-on-line pump start, with voltage dip and recovery held within limits the pumps tolerate.
Fully automatic mains-failure operation — the station rides through every outage with no operator action, day or night.
Perkins 4000-series platform with an established in-country parts and dealer network, so scheduled service never waits on international freight.
Project Gallery
The Result
Since commissioning, the unit has carried the station through the grid’s routine outages with water pressure maintained throughout — the failure residents notice most is the one that has stopped happening.
On-site commissioning results matched the factory load-test data within measurement tolerance, and the utility has since requested a proposal for its second pumping station on the same configuration.
One engine now stands between a city’s water pressure and the grid’s bad days — sized for the hardest motor start, not the average load.