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The Largest Vacuum Sewerage System in the Southern Hempisphere

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A vibrant masterplanned community is being established 25 minutes drive from Adelaide in South Australia. Lang Walker head of one of Australia’s largest developer’s Walker Corporation opened the new entrance to Adelaide’s newest suburb, Riverlea, last month.

The community will have 12,000 houses, and include three schools, large shopping and commercial centres. The whole area will be serviced by a Flovac vacuum sewerage system. A vacuum system was chosen due to the environmental benefits of installing a sewer system in an area that has a high water table. Less pump station infrastructure means lower power. The shallow pipework operating under a negative pressure means no risk of infiltration nor of any risks of sewage leaking out into the environment. Low Cost Flexibility.

The whole system will have the latest in wireless monitoring at every collection pit.  You can read about the benefits here. This will allow SA Water to reduce their operational costs and risks. Predictive alerts, rain water sensors, pressure sensing and energy use will all be incorporated into the utilities SCADA as well as being fully available to operators and management via a cloud platform.

Vacuum sewer systems are often used in septic to sewer programs for existing towns. But we have also seen a big increase in their use by developers due to their environmental benefits and low cost installation. There is also the benefit of flexibility. For the first part of this project Flovac supplied a deployable vacuum pump station to provide service to the irst 200 houses prior to the main pump station infrastructure being built.

Deployable Vacuum Pump Station for staging of development

Award Winning Vacuum Pump Station Design

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The Hunua Views Flovac vacuum pump station located between Drury and Ramarama south of Auckland in New Zealand has taken out the highly commended award in the 2021 ADNZ Resene Architectual Awards. The design was done by Madushin Amarasekera of Construkt Associated for Classic Homes, a major developer in New Zealand.

The Hunua Views residential development , is serviced by a vacuum sewer system after deep gravity sewers and low pressure pumps were rejected by Watercare, the main utility looking after the Auckland area. Up to 1,000 houses will be connected to the new vacuum pump station.

The comment at the awards

A beautifully bold and intriguingly sculptural project by Madushin Amarasekera of Construkt Associates NZ took out a Commercial/Industrial accolade in the 2021 ADNZ Resene Architectural Design Awards. With a need to accommodate very specific engineering functions, Madushin took the opportunity to create not only a functional home to the pump station, but also a building to act as a site marker within its residential context. We love the irregular roof geometry which perfectly accompanies the textured precast concrete panels.
🏆 2021 ADNZ Resene Architectural Design Highly Commended for Commercial/Industrial Award.
Watercare are naturally very proud of the new infrastructure and were very involved in the coordination of everyone involved. When designing and creating the structure, specific engineering functions needed to be met and there was a lot of coordination between the architect, civil, structural, services & acoustic engineers, precast fabricator and Flovac, the vacuum system specialist. In fact, it’s so detailed that all the vents were acoustic rated while the control room is positioned on the south side, providing an acoustic buffer for nearby residential dwellings.

Flovac is the largest vacuum system supplier in New Zealand and has established a production facility on the north island of NZ to handle the business growth within the country.

Photos by Calvin Hui