Commissioning & Debugging
A plant works on paper, then you put water through it for the first time and something always doesn't behave. Membranes don't quite hit recovery, conductivity drifts, a cooling-tower programme fights the make-up water, an effluent plant trips on a TSS spike. Commissioning is where you find these and fix them — and the fix is usually small if you catch it early.
Four pieces of work, run together.
The signals that point at this service.
- →New plant just finished construction and you're about to put water through it
- →Existing plant has been overhauled or had major equipment changed and needs re-commissioning
- →Plant has been running but never been formally verified against its original design specification
- →Acquiring a plant with another company and want a third-party performance verification
- →RO membranes recently replaced and you want a clean baseline for the new lot
How a typical engagement runs.
Document review
We read the design package — P&IDs, equipment schedules, controls narrative — before stepping foot on site. Saves a day of asking obvious questions.
Pre-commissioning walk-down
Two engineers, one day, head-to-toe inspection of mechanical and electrical. Punch list issued the same evening.
Punch list closeout
Site team works the punch list. Typically 3-7 working days. We come back to verify.
Water-on
Step-up to design flow over 4-8 hours. Continuous instrument monitoring, sample pulls every 30 minutes for the first 4 hours then hourly.
Performance verification run
72-hour stable run at design conditions. Hourly logs, lab samples at start/24h/48h/72h. Performance report at the end.
Tuning and handover
Programme tuning over the first 30 days. Final handover meeting with operations team. Written commissioning report filed.
What this typically costs.
Day-rate engagement, typically PKR 65,000 – PKR 95,000 per engineer-day plus travel and per-diem. A standard 100-300 m³/day RO plant commissioning runs 12-18 engineer-days end-to-end. ETP commissioning runs 18-30 engineer-days because the bio-stage takes weeks to stabilise.
What buyers ask before signing.
How is commissioning different from start-up?
Start-up is putting water through the plant. Commissioning is verifying that what comes out the other end matches the contract specification — and fixing it where it doesn't. Most plants 'start up' fine and 'commission' poorly because the commissioning step gets compressed.
Can you commission a plant that wasn't designed by you?
Yes — about 40% of our commissioning work is on plants designed and built by other firms. We're sometimes called in because the original designer is no longer available or because the plant owner wants a third-party verification.
What's a typical commissioning issue you find?
Wrong pump rotation, undersized antiscalant dosing line, biocide pump set to the wrong flow, a flow meter installed two diameters downstream of an elbow, multimedia filters loaded in the wrong order, a control valve plumbed reverse-acting. None of these would necessarily fail at commissioning testing if you don't look — but they will fail in operation.
How quickly can a bio-stage ETP be commissioned?
Aerobic biotreatment needs 30-60 days for the biomass to stabilise to design MLSS and start removing COD reliably. We design the commissioning programme around that — early days are seed-and-feed, then ramp-up of organic load, then stable operation. Trying to compress this is the single biggest cause of ETP performance failure.
Do you provide a commissioning report?
Yes — written report covering the as-tested performance against contract specification, any deviations, root-cause analysis on issues found, corrective actions taken, and recommendations for the operating envelope. Typically 25-40 pages with appendix data. Used as the baseline document for the plant's lifetime.
Same factory address. Same engineering team. Same number on WhatsApp.
Tell us the scope, the plant, the timeline. We come back with an honest quote — usually the same business day.
- Textile ETP Program Effluent treatment chemistry for Pakistani textile mills — coagulation, flocculation, biocide, COD reduction, and sludge dewatering on one accountable program.
- Refinery Process Water Program RO antiscalant, membrane biocide, and process-water engineering for Pakistani refineries — Karachi-stocked, COA-disciplined, validated against PRL / PARCO / ARL / NRL feedwater profiles.