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| Engineered Fluid: Pump House |
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| Written by John Zorabedian | ||
| Thursday, 31 July 2008 19:00 | ||
 Goodspeed’s father Jack started his manufacturing company in his home in Centralia, Ill. in 1964, building small, packaged water treatment plants. Since the 1970s, the company, Engineered Fluid, Inc. (EFI), has focused exclusively on building and supplying equipment for the municipal water distribution market, especially factory built, water booster pump stations.About 30 years ago, Goodspeed recalled, the company built some underground stations for a town in Ohio that wanted to build them out in a flood plain. To keep the pump stations dry and accessible during potential flooding, Jack Goodspeed and EFI built access towers to allow workers to enter the stations above the anticipated high water level of the floodwaters. Goodspeed said his father, who retired in 2005, opted to get out of the packaged water treatment and sewage business in the late ’70s to specialize the company in a niche market. Over the last 30 years, EFI has grown into a $50 million company by providing custom designed and built below-ground and above-ground water pump stations for public and private water companies across the US. Beginning in the 1980s, EFI began producing its trademarked Water Shed, a factory-built above-ground pump station that is transported by an EFI semi-tractor-trailer truck anywhere in the lower 48 states. The company also supplies large modular pumping systems for on-site reassembly. These EFI pump stations allow municipalities to provide pressure to their water systems for distributing water to and from storage tanks, reservoirs, or along the system piping networks that feed residential, commercial, and industrial demand. As older water systems deteriorate from decades of use, their pumping stations often need to be replaced. “We’re the only company in our market with a strategic focus exclusively on municipal water distribution equipment,” Goodspeed said. “Usually our competitors are fabricators coming out of other markets. We’re the only company I’m aware of that has competent design engineers, a factory-direct service department, and the ability to deliver all of its stations with its own trucks, providing a single source for project responsibility.” In 1994, the company produced its first large-scale modular pump system, called the P-1, for the city of Henderson, Nev. The station has a capacity to pump 41 million gallons per day (MGD), roughly 29,000 gallons per minute. Larger and more complicated designs have followed. Work flow EFI is a designer and manufacturer of factory-built municipal water booster pump stations, control valve and master meter stations, as well as a full line of SCADA and telemetry controls for the municipal water distribution market. In today’s market, Goodspeed said the company is working to drive out inefficiencies and raise quality. The company prides itself on its speed of delivery to municipal customers, some of whom order pump stations for school and other projects for as little as six weeks out. Usually, the company projects 16 weeks from order to delivery, but Goodspeed said he can turn it up a notch to deliver sooner. “We may not be the cheapest, but we are definitely the lowest total cost and best value because of our consistently high quality, service, support, and delivery,” Goodspeed said. “We face the current economic conditions by maintaining our efficiencies and relying on the strength our company has always had: to be flexible to respond to changing conditions. Our production capability is one of our strengths, and we deliver quickly.” EFI gets orders for about 350 pump stations annually. “That has stayed fairly constant. We expect to do about that many this year,” Goodspeed said. In a flooding year like this, Goodspeed may be getting orders for replacements for damaged or flooded pump stations. “If a pump station is flooded, our customers can call our service department to come out and repair it to quickly get it fixed and operational quickly,” Goodspeed said. |