A Cyclone, Three Pumps, and No Mechanical Dewatering
Not every wastewater plant gets a centrifuge or a belt press. Smaller facilities — the ones serving 5,000 PE catchments in Umbria's hill towns — run sludge to drying beds and call it a season. The economics work differently here. The capital cost of a mechanical dewatering line can't be justified when the plant produces four cubic meters of excess sludge per week. But the inspection discipline has to be just as rigorous, because the same discharge limits apply regardless of plant size.
This template covers the full process train from the cyclone grit separator through biological treatment to the drying beds, with a triple-pump lift station that most small-plant templates ignore entirely.
The Cyclone That Separates the Professionals from the Amateurs
Hydrocyclones in WWTP pre-treatment are not exotic equipment, but they fail in ways that most operators don't monitor. The template tracks cyclone vibration and noise as a separate rating from the downstream sand classifier. That separation is deliberate: the cyclone can function perfectly while the classifier vibrates itself loose from its mounting bolts, or the classifier can run clean while the cyclone's vortex finder erodes and starts passing grit straight through to the biological section.
The sand big-bag section mirrors the screenings bag management — fill level on the same six-point scale, substitution as a boolean, area cleanliness as a rating. When you track sand bag fill rates against rainfall data from the weather condition field, you get a direct correlation between storm events and grit loading. That's information your process engineer needs for sizing the replacement grit removal system in ten years.
Triple Lift Station: Why P3 Exists
Two submersible pumps with alternating duty is standard. This plant has three: P1, P2, and P3, each with independent functionality and noise ratings. The third pump is the standby that should never run under normal conditions. When P3's log shows it activating regularly, either P1 or P2 has lost capacity, or peak flows are exceeding the original design hydraulic loading.
Most operators won't flag this because P3 running means the plant still works. The alarm doesn't trigger. The bypass doesn't activate. But the pattern in the data — P3 entries jumping from zero to three per week in autumn — tells you the infiltration problem in the upstream sewer network just got worse, and next year's spring melt will blow past the design capacity.
Drying Beds and the Volume Nobody Tracks
The sludge management section ends not with a mechanical dewatering checklist but with a single field: volume discharged to the drying beds. One free-text entry. That's the number that determines whether the beds will be ready for the next loading cycle or whether you'll arrive on a Monday morning to find saturated sludge that hasn't dewatered because the previous week's discharge exceeded the bed's hydraulic capacity.
The slow agitator in the thickening section gets its own vibration/noise rating. When the agitator fails on a plant this size, sludge concentration in the thickener drops, and you end up pumping dilute sludge to the drying beds — which means longer drying times, reduced bed turnover, and eventually running out of available bed area in the middle of a wet month.
The QE panel check is a single field here — no separate command panels for polymer or dewatering stations, because there are none. One general panel, one visual absorption reading, one opportunity per visit to catch an overcurrent condition before it trips the breaker at 2 AM and leaves the lift station dead until the morning crew arrives.