Muntons is a family-owned manufacturer of malts and malting ingredients across the globe. Based in the UK, the company relocated to its current 45-acre Stowmarket site in 1948, occupying buildings originally constructed for the British Nylon Spinners company who vacated shortly after the war.

Our project involved installing a new boosted water supply system and associated pipework to enable the removal of the gravity-feed water supply system located in a deteriorating brick tower scheduled for demolition.

Given the logistics of changing over the system from tank fed to boosted supply, whilst keeping the site live, new branches were cut in during a planned shutdown. This allows future connections to be made with limited interruption to operations and provides the flexibility to reverse engineer the system if necessary.

The new boosted water system consists of a cold-water booster set operating in duty/assist/standby configuration, located within the exiting pump house and fed from an adjacent 60m3 vertical vessel. As this vessel was damaged and only operating at two thirds capacity, the feed was diverted to a redundant RO tank of similar size as part of the works.

The pump house sits remote from the main building, so both above and below pipework routes were investigated. The below ground solution that was adopted required 180mm Protecta-line barrier pipe via directional drilling to avoid existing services and eliminate the need for open excavation near the main building entrance. The pipework above ground was installed using stainless steel tube ranging from 168mm to 54mm, complete with a range of stainless-steel press fit fittings.

Thanks to careful planning and clear communications with both main contractor Gipping and the client, the project was delivered with minimal disruption to Muntons daily operations.