Presentation is everything, especially in the mobile water supply business. Porta Kleen was charged with providing wastewater and freshwater services to several construction trailers at the gigantic New Albany, Ohio Intel site. The trailers were too large for Porta Kleen’s smaller water systems to handle so technicians improvised a system of water tanks hooked to a pump and wrapped in a heating blanket.

The improvised system worked well enough, but it was ugly and maintenance heavy. “We sat back and looked at it and thought, ‘What can we do to clean this up?’” said Production Manager Lee Godenschwager. “We got the boys in engineering to look at it.” The result was an impressive new device simply called the “Water System Trailer.”

Mechanical Systems Engineer Brian Marcum knew immediately that designing the Water System Trailer would be challenging. “We were tasked to take all of the existing, improvised systems and contain them in a single trailer package,” he said. First of all, the device would be heavy, so the design started with a 14,000-pound capacity chassis—not only would the equipment be heavy, but it also had to carry 1,800 gallons of water.

Marcum said the project required developing a serviceable layout that provided the most capacity possible in the trailer. “We ended up with a 1,000-gallon wastewater tank and an 800-gallon freshwater tank,” he said. “We also knew that building the trailer efficiently was important. We designed it as a skid that could be built outside of the trailer and inserted as a complete unit.”

Still, this was enough capacity for one of the Water System Trailers to service five construction trailers whereby each ugly improvised system could only service one trailer. And the Water System Trailer can service those five trailers for five times longer than the improvised system could service a single construction trailer.

“Intel didn’t like how they were paying for having our service truck come out so often for the smaller units,” Marcum said. “This new system is really well-liked.” In fact, there are two Large Water Systems serving a total of 10 Intel construction trailers. The new systems have been at the site since earlier this summer. Marcum’s uncertain when or if any more of the Water System Trailers will be built, but he said Intel is very pleased with the innovative new Porta Kleen devices.

“No competitor has anything like this,” Marcum said. He explained most competing companies only offer a smaller “watercart” or rely on the unsightly improvised systems. “The difference between us and everyone else is that we saw the needs of our customer and developed a clean package that gave them exactly what they needed and more,” Marcum said, “and our competitors still do it like it’s always been done.”