Evolution Of The Hippo

01 August, 2007

An unlikely mutation caused by a distinct set of fortuitous events, the Hippowash wheelwash system is at the cutting edge of site-based vehicle decontamination and cleaning. MQR caught up with MD Chris McCumesky at a Biffa landfill site to find out more about the origins and future direction of the product pushing the envelope in an industry area not normally known for its drive towards innovation.

Threats to national stability are a wellspring for invention. The cold war, for example, created a raft of products we now take as commonplace such as the microwave oven, the smoke detector, GPS and even hang gliders.

But it is not just perceived global annihilation that can act as the mother of invention. More localised economic turbulence can introduce the necessity for a new product. A good example of this was the foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001.

Vehicle contamination played a large role in the spread of the virus. Many farmers used a ford or water splash to clean the wheels – as they did during the recent outbreak in Sussex. And, as the eradication of the virus was the focus of attention, any disinfectant used normally ended up in water courses.

However, steel fabrication company boss Chris McCumesky thought there could be a better way. Together with a fabrication design engineer he created a machine that would disinfect vehicle tyres while re-circulating the disinfectant.

“It was called Cem Kleen,” he explains. “We don’t really make it anymore but we get the occasional call. We got a lot of interest at the time of avian flu outbreak. It was the birth of the principle behind our current much larger system of wheelwashing.”

The larger system the MD of CDM Steels and former nuclear submarine mechanic McCumesky is referring to is Hippowash, a versatile wheelwasher that deserves the label innovative in an industry niche not known for its blue sky thinking.

It’s the contaminant removing equivalent of an evolutionary mutation with inverter drives powering the water pumps and a lamella clarifier for doing away with the need for lagoons – as well as the costs associated with them.

And this is not all. After years of wheelwash systems being viewed as a costly necessary evil, they are about to undertake another evolutionary jump. McCumesky is proposing Hippowash systems help make operators some money in the process.

“We always fancied the idea of a filter press removing the solids from liquids in a system. Traditionally, however, they have been very expensive and wheelwashers already suffer from price pressure.

“But we kept eye on market and now have a solution. At the least the filter press offers easy disposal of sludge but its cake can also be sold as a secondary product. This offers operators 100% recycling and a sellable end material,” he says.

It may all sound a bit revolutionary for wheelwashers, but the same could have been said four years ago when McCumesky released a washer with a water clarifying unit. In 2004 he manufactured and sold 18 of these units, last year it was 26 and this year the firm is on target to produce and sell 40-45.

If growth continues at the same pace, explains McCumesky, the firm will have to move from its 929m² workspace in Crewe to at least a 2,800m² operation. He hasn’t found anything yet but there are options, he says, and has already started the process of hiring new sales staff and a product manager to add to the current 17 staff members.

It is all a long way from his early days as a mechanic on nuclear submarines, which he feels gave him a good business grounding. “Living and working at close quarters for long periods with others in submarines makes you very tolerant of people.

“I was a mechanic dealing with keeping the nuclear plant purring. I kept the main turbo generators running along with purification systems and air purification pumps. I suppose there is link there with Hippowash,” he muses.

He left the Navy to get into business. “I’ve always been a bit of a wheeler dealer,” he admits. Computing training after the Navy led him into a “dull operations job” before gaining a HND in business studies from Stockport college and moving to sales in FMCG. Then came steel stockholding.

“I lost my driving licence after two drinks too many and so couldn’t do traditional selling so looked for a selling job on the telephone and fell into steel. It made sense. I knew engineering from my Navy days and the cut-throat FMCG market had honed my sales skills.

“When I got to my mid-30s after selling for a range of firms I thought it was time to set up my own steel company. So I sent my wife into Barclays Bank to borrow £5,000 pounds and we transferred this into a NatWest business account. This was the birth of CDM Steels,” he explains.

McCumesky had Rieter Scragg as a major client when he started in 1994 and the £5,000 allowed him to buy steel and work from the kitchen table. By 1995 he had a storage yard and started to get into profiling. Then he was made an offer he found hard to refuse.

“A client we were working for decided to move their machine shop. They gave us the profiling. They had a big milling machine and didn’t want to take it to the new premises so they asked if we would run the machine for them.

“We negotiated we would run it in their factory. So I employed the staff, scheduled the machine, bought the tooling, serviced the machine and added that process to what we did for them. It was still their factory but I took the lot on,” he explains.

This saw him through to 1997 when he gained the current factory in Crewe and went into manufacturing. It was a rental agreement with option to purchase at an agreed price, a bit of foresight that served him well when he came to exercise the option.

“We had it index-related to price when we first moved in. A lucky move because industrial property had grown in price over the time so it gave us a good start,” he says.

Within a couple of years the company had grown but the market was shifting. Rieter Scragg shipped its work out to Eastern Europe and India and McCumesky saw the need for a broader business base. One new customer CDM picked up was Wheelwash, an event that would help shape Hippowash.

“We built the fabrications for Wheelwash for a couple of years and so it gave us a good grounding in the needs of these systems and potential areas for improvement through our experience as fabrication engineers,” he explains.

With foot-and-mouth came the impetus to capitalise on this knowledge and out came its Cem Kleen product targeted at cars and light vehicles. CDM also supplied control panels, pumps, motors and sensors along with the fabrication. So from there it was only a small step to large vehicle wheelwash systems.

“In late 2001 we built our first prototype machine,” explains McCumesky. “It was close to the product we have now. The construction of the platform is the same. It was designed to withstand the weight and dynamic pressure of the 100s of 45tonne vehicles running over it and rumble off the muck from the heavy treads.

“We also took a different approach to the way the spray system was housed. As part of the structure we have a hollow section ring main so the fabricated element is supporting the structure, withstanding the pressure from the vehicle and also applying the water. This allows us to get water to the parts of the vehicle that are important such as in between the treads, between the mudguards and under the chassis,” he explains.

At the time of the prototype the only water recycling systems available were concrete lagoons and steel settlement tanks. The first machine he built had a combined settlement tank, control panel and header tank and pump house.

It was trialled on a quarry where the owner had a sticky clay site and a 50m haul road between the wash and the road. The system was a hit. However, the quarry owner didn’t have a budget so McCumesky offered a peppercorn rent in return for showing potential clients the site. “That job was the birth of Hippowash really,” he says.

Two years later and McCumesky was getting restless with the product. “I was trying to develop a system better than the one we had. It was all still settlement tanks or lagoons.

“Water recycling is all about surface area so we knew we would need a lot of settlement tanks to improve the system, while concreting is expensive and not portable. Then we heard about the lamella clarifier,” he says.

Used for removing surplus site water and discharging it into watercourses at a contamination level acceptable to the Environment Agency, the Siltbuster FB50 is the plant that caught McCumesky’s eye.

It uses rows of diagonal lamella plates to increase filtering surface area – it is equivalent to a 100,000litre settlement tank. And unlike a lagoon or a tank the solids only have to settle around 30mm, speeding up the filtering process (see box left).

McCumesky got in touch with Siltbuster and a few months later the HB50ST was born. Siltbuster’s Flat Bottom 50m³ an hour clarifier (FB50) had become the Hopper Bottom 50m³ an hour Surge Tank (HB50ST) model, which CDM now manufactures under licence. McCumesky explains the name change.

“We added the surge tank to balance out the flow rate from the wash, to slow it down to get the best effect through Siltbuster. We tried the FB50 but the flow rate was too fast and the area for the silt to sit in was too small. So we added the hoppers and the surge tank and did the fabrication. It was a joint product really.”

Fast forward a couple more years and the Hippo is mutating again. Although it is early days, this time it has developed a 33, 630mm² plate, 32-chamber filter press from Micronics, something McCumesky was keen to add a while ago.

“It has always been a matter of cost. When Hippowash was £30,000-40,000, a press would have been the same price, which always frustrated me because I knew it would be perfect. Prices are more acceptable now,” he says.

It works by sucking the muck from the hopper bottom with minimal operator involvement. It is connected to the hoppers at the bottom of the Siltbuster, the valve is opened and the press draws in the sludge using a vacuum pump.

However, while shown to work in the lab, the press still needs a few bugs removing before before it becomes a practical reality. This became clear at Hillhead where the system was dewatering sludge in the discharge pipe leaving a blockage.

But Micronics says it is on the case and McCumesky is confident the problems will soon be rectified. He is looking for a site to test the press so if you are interested give him a ring.

And when the press has bedded in, he feels he will have pushed the envelope as far as it will go in terms of the Hippowash offering. But with CDM Steels currently manufacturing its 100th Hippowash system and seeking to change its company name to Hippowash, he says he won’t become complacent with the product. But at the same time he is not a man to sit still.

Already coming off the drawing board is a design for a small, easy to set up washing recycling system that can be drawn behind a four-wheel drive. And there is something bigger in the offing for plant hire firms.

“We have in the pipeline a mobile wash down pad with water recycling,” says McCumesky. “Most plant hirers clean plant with high pressure washers and steam cleaners on to a concrete pad and all the mud and contaminants go down the drain.

“They can’t do that any more but the civils involved with meeting legislation are costly especially for jobs that only take a couple of years. So the mobile system will allow them to take wash down plant from job to job.

And so the Hippo continues to evolve, making waves in pools used to still water, something McCumesky plans to keep doing. As he says, “It is about finding the right solution for customers. In the end all we have is our customers.” How true.

Hippowash: 01270 252669