Troubleshooting & Optimisation
Plants drift. Membranes foul earlier than they should, cooling-tower scale starts showing up at the wrong concentration cycles, an ETP starts losing nitrification for no obvious reason. Most of the time the cause is small, specific, and fixable in a week — but you have to know where to look. That's our day job.
Four pieces of work, run together.
The signals that point at this service.
- →RO recovery has dropped or pressure-drop has climbed and you don't know why
- →Cooling-tower programme has stopped controlling scale or microbiology
- →Effluent plant has had a discharge excursion and you need to know if it's a one-off or systemic
- →Operating cost has crept up and you suspect chemistry is being over-dosed
- →Plant is hitting design spec but you think it could do better — looking for gains, not fixing failures
How a typical engagement runs.
Phone diagnostic
30-60 minutes. We listen to the symptom, look at the data you can share remotely, and form an initial hypothesis. Often this alone resolves it without an on-site visit.
On-site investigation
1-2 days at the plant. Walk-down, instrument check, sample pulls, log review, conversations with operators. Hypothesis refined or replaced.
Lab work
Where the symptom involves membranes, scale, biofilm, or unknown chemistry, we run lab work — typically 5-10 working days for results. Sometimes parallel to the on-site visit.
Recommendation report
Written report — root cause, recommended fix, expected effort and cost to implement, monitoring plan to verify the fix. 5-15 pages depending on complexity.
Implementation support
Where the client wants us to implement, we run the implementation. Where they want to do it in-house, we hand off and stay available for questions.
What this typically costs.
Diagnostic call-out: PKR 65,000 – PKR 120,000 day rate plus travel. Membrane autopsy: PKR 95,000 per element. Structured optimisation studies: fixed-fee, typically PKR 450,000 – PKR 1,200,000 for a 4-8 week engagement. Many troubleshooting engagements roll into a longer-term O&M relationship.
What buyers ask before signing.
How fast can you get to a plant in an emergency?
Karachi: same day or next morning, depending on time of call. Lahore / Islamabad / Faisalabad: 24-36 hours. Smaller cities: 48-72 hours. We don't promise a 4-hour response anywhere — that's a marketing promise that almost no firm in Pakistan can actually deliver. We do promise honest timing.
What's the most common RO membrane fouling cause in Pakistan?
Organic / biological foul, by a wide margin. Pakistani feedwater is biologically rich, especially in summer, and most antiscalant programmes don't include adequate biocide. Calcium and silica scaling are second and third. Mechanical damage from particulate breakthrough during filter media issues is fourth but the most expensive when it happens.
Can you autopsy a membrane I pull and ship to you?
Yes — pull the membrane, dry-pack it in its original housing, courier to our Karachi lab. We typically have results in 7-10 working days from receipt. Send the operating data alongside (pressure-drop trend, conductivity rejection trend, flow rate) — the autopsy plus the data tells a much better story than either alone.
Do you fix problems on plants you didn't design or build?
Yes — about 70% of troubleshooting engagements are on third-party-built plants. The owner's familiarity with the original designer is often gone by the time something goes wrong, and we're vendor-neutral by design.
How do you charge for an optimisation study where the savings are uncertain?
Fixed fee for the engineering, with the savings determined ex-post. We're upfront about which plants offer realistic optimisation upside — for some plants there isn't any low-hanging fruit and the honest answer is 'leave it alone, you're already operating well.' We'd rather decline an engagement than do a pointless one.
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.