Olympic Stadium, Munich

Automatic stagnation flushes – maintaining drinking water quality

The major fluctuations in use affecting sanitary facilities at the Stadium constitute a serious risk to drinking water hygiene, because the water will stagnate in the installation during periods of downtime. This could permit bacteria such as Legionella to exceed critical concentrations in the water. Stagnation flushes can be used to purge the system of stagnating water quickly and easily.

Unlike manual flushing at the fitting or the WC cistern, SCHELL’s SWS Water Management System offers a centralised approach to programming and triggering stagnation flushes automatically, as well as documenting all of the flushes performed. The software also offers centralised configuration for a wide range of fitting parameters. Fittings can also be formed into groups, allowing the simultaneous triggering of multiple fittings at a specific point in time. This has the key advantage of being able to achieve the high flow velocities in the drinking water installation that are required to create a turbulent flow and therefore to ensure the effective flushing of the whole piping system, including pipe walls.

Reduced water consumption and personnel requirements

Apart from helping to maintain drinking water quality, automated flushes also support the cost-effective operation of the Olympia Stadium. Water consumption is reduced, because significantly lower volumes of water are used than for the manual triggering of stagnation flushes. And fewer personnel are required, too: for manual flushing, extensive routine (and simultaneous) flushes would be a time-consuming job for many employees. The electronic SCHELL fittings and cistern modules perform the prescribed stagnation flushes automatically via SWS (with settings configured as appropriate).

Protection from leaks and critical temperatures

With so many fittings needing to be networked, the Stadium has deployed a total of ten SWS servers, as well as ten leak protection fittings and temperature sensors. Thanks to these leak protection fittings, the drinking water installation can be shut off either completely or partially at times when there are no users in the building. If a leak occurs, water flows are kept to a minimum. We should also point out that this isn’t a contradiction to what was said above: stagnation flushes always have priority and the leak protection fitting is opened to allow them. When stagnation flushes are triggered, leak protection fittings open automatically and are then shut off again afterwards.
Thanks to the built-in temperature sensors, temperature-controlled stagnation flushes are also possible alongside scheduled flushes: these can detect critical water temperatures and then flush the water out via electronic fittings.

With SWS, even complex drinking water installations like the one at the Olympia Stadium – with well over 100 WCs, urinals and wash basin taps – can be operated and managed effectively and conveniently. All system data, covering flush times, fitting parameters, temperature curves and much more, is recorded and documented, so that facility managers can access this data and make adjustments whenever necessary.