Happy New Year

To our friends we have worked with this past year, Thank you.  You have helped make 2012 a great year for us and we hope we have helped streamline your projects and assist in your success.

2013, can you believe it?  I remember being a kid watching the movie '2001: A Space Odyssey', thinking that, by now, we would all be flying around with jet packs and taking weekend vacations to Mars.  I was certain that our energy was going to come from fusion reactors, and transporter beams were going to start looking like a real possibility.  When I watched Apollo 11 land on the moon, I was pretty sure space colonies were just around the corner.  Man, was I a few years off, because in 2013 most advanced onsite treatment manufacturers can't even build a reliable denitrifying septic system yet, but, to their credit, they sure have mastered the art of marketing in the 21st century to make you believe they can.

Eliminite has been busy with quite a few new and interesting projects.  We currently have three new highway rest areas in various stages of completion.  We completed a good deal of field work on a large highway rest area treatment system in November. The working conditions were pretty miserable, but we were able to get the internal components of the treatment system installed before the contractor had to shut down for winter. 


Justin and Tony at the highway rest area installation on one of the nicer days.

This is a custom system specifically designed for the application and site conditions.  For many reasons, most manufacturers only supply pre-fabricated pods.  Big pods, little pods, medium pods, but always just a bunch of pods, most of which feature parts manufactured overseas or, at minimum, outside the U.S.  That's one way to run a business, but it's not how we run our business at Eliminite. We balance many interests and needs on every single job; each client has different objectives, different budgets, different treatment demands. So, we select design configurations and materials best suited for the job, utilizing as many locally-sourced materials as possible.  Anything we don't make ourselves, we prefer to purchase from a business in or near the same location as the actual job. Sounds obvious, but it is less common than you'd think...a lot less common than it should be, in this industry. On this particular rest area, we used tanks from a local supplier, which is better for the local economy than shipping in pods from who-knows-where, and minimizes waste inherent to shipping long distances. Sometimes, cheaper isn't better, especially when the "cheaper" per-item cost fails to reflect the true cost of importing something thousands of miles, from a place with few environmental regulations.  The local supplier was able to manufacture tanks that fit the site conditions very well, which made the job easier on the contractor. 

Back in 2005 at this site, the first contractor installed fiberglass septic tanks which, from what I hear, was quite a failure.  The site has high ground water and the contractor had a heck of a time dewatering and setting the fiberglass.  It sounds as if the tanks were never installed properly and, if the engineering consultants had thought about it, they would have designed something different.  But, big fiberglass tanks are usually selected without any thought for site conditions or bedding haul distances, particularly on jobs where state, federal and grant funding are available.  The system we are constructing is housed in strong, durable precast concrete cells.  This means that backfill and bedding operations are not nearly as critical as they would be with fiberglass, and there was no need to import expensive sand and peagravel to be placed by hand.  Dewatering was not as critical because the concrete tanks do not float like fiberglass.  In miserable field conditions(snow, cold, rain, sleet, ice pellets and frozen fog) the last thing you want to be doing is monkeying around with a bunch of temperamental, fragile pods and installation-sensitive fiberglass tanks. Of course fiberglass tanks have their place and when they make sense they are a good product.  My point is, Eliminite provides options that the others cannot provide due to inherent limitations to their underlying technologies and processes.
Eliminite systems are less expensive, period, and that's by design.  We are working on a highway rest area job that was recently out for competitive bid. The Eliminite system was quite a bit less expensive than the pod system, and Eliminite was awarded the job.  This is a common occurrence:  once engineers, contractors and owners see and understand what we can do, we usually get the job.   We also have the experience and knowledge to provide meaningful design assistance to the design-build team and can usually help save them some additional time and money. 

The bottom line is, this all comes down to numbers, not feelings, catchy sales slogans, or who has a bigger team of full time lobbyists.

• Equipment cost numbers
• Installation cost numbers
• Treated results numbers
• Time between maintenance interval numbers 

I look forward to working with you all in the new year, and I can assure you that Eliminite is committed to you and your project.  Now is a good time, if you don't have experience with us already, to give me a call and discuss that important project and the numbers.  We have a nice long list of references that I would be happy to share with you.