Most ships were not designed for ballast water treatment. As this regulation has rolled out over the years, there have been many improvements and many new systems available but the one constant that has always remained is that there is simply no place to put a treatment system on many different vessels.

Enter the Hyde GUARDIAN®, the full-line ballast water treatment system with the smallest footprint available on the market*.
*Based on size of treatment stages

What is the Challenge?

Ballast water treatment is a complex task. Designing a system to meet the IMO and U.S.C.G. requirements necessitates taking a system designed to treat the water for a small city, make that equipment compact enough to fit on a ship, ensure it is usable by a crew who has dozens of more pressing things to do, all while ensuring that the water is treated to a standard higher than most municipal drinking water standards regardless of where the water comes from.

Definitely a daunting task!

The Hyde GUARDIAN, though, stands ready to face it. Designed with the absolute minimum number of components and based on a simple UV-treatment methodology, the GUARDIAN system is tailor-made for installation on challenging vessels.  There are three key advantages to the GUARDIAN design that ensure we maintain our footprint advantage:

  1. The UV Chamber: Our in-line, medium pressure UV Chamber designed for perpendicular lamp orientation to flow ensures that the chamber itself can simply be installed in the ballast piping directly, taking no additional space from the vessel. The short medium-pressure UV lamps also significantly reduce maintenance space requirements. For our smallest systems, the Hyde Marine single-sided UV Chamber also eliminates the maintenance envelope on one side of the chamber for installation in an overhead or against a bulkhead.
  2. The GUARDIAN Lamp Circuit: Hyde Marine uses traditional magnetic ballasts in our lamp circuits.  In addition to improving the reliability and robustness of the circuit, magnetic ballasts allow for the power supply of the UV Chamber to be mounted farther away than would be possible with electronic ballasts.  These increased lamp wire lengths allow the power supply to be mounted outside the machinery spaces where additional spare space can be located.
  3. No Extra Components:  Hyde Marine does not require our customers to install additional cleaning skids, or piping connections to purge our units with fresh water. Fewer components equates to a smaller footprint and less piping to install during your retrofit.

Skid vs. Components

UV for disinfection is broken down into two different types of lamps: low pressure UV lamps and medium pressure UV lamps.  While each gets their name based on pressure of the pressure of the gas inside the lamp, the primary difference between medium pressure and low pressure lamps relates to the spectrum of light being emitted by the lamp.  Medium pressure UV systems emit a broad spectrum of UV disinfecting light, while low pressure UV lamps emit targeted light targeted to the “germicidal spectrum” of 254 nm

Having the smallest footprint brings a unique capability to Hyde Marine in that we often can find space available to install our skid-mounted systems, even on retrofit projects.

Skid-based systems have a number of advantages over component systems when it comes to commissioning and installing a system. Skids come completely assembled, pre-tested, and pre-wired to ensure that you have a minimum number of piping and electrical connections to make.  Skid systems are also completely wet tested in our factory to ensure they are ready for installation and properly connected.

No space for a skidded system? Optimize space and configurability by going with a component system.  Either way each system is fully tested and ready to go when it is delivered to your ship.

What to Watch Know What You Are Getting

There are a lot of companies that tout the size of their systems, or compare themselves to the Hyde GUARDIAN when it comes to space.  Be careful, though, that they are not leaving out critical pieces of equipment or key details when comparing themselves to us.

Do they require you to add a dedicated fresh water line to provide cooling to their power supply? We don’t.

Do they require the UV Chamber to be flushed with fresh water after every use? We don’t.

Do they require a separate cleaning package to clean their UV Chamber? We don’t.

Do they force the ballast flow to stop to allow for a cleaning cycle to take place? We don’t.

Do they have an extensive training program required to be done before operating the system? We don’t.

Can you recalibrate your UV Sensor right on board, during ballast operations? Ours does.

Whether you are simply comparing the number of components or looking at the many different hotel services that a ballast water treatment system requires when you install it, make sure you ask the right questions. When you know what you are getting, usually you end up getting a Hyde GUARDIAN.