SWAN Irrigation System

The Swan Valley Irrigation Scheme is situated in the Tasmanian east coastal region of the Swan River Valley and was built to supplement the unreliable rainfall in the region. The pump station built on the banks of the Swan River needed to harvest large quantities of water infrequently from the river during high flow events. The water is pumped to the nearby Melrose dam at flowrates of 2100 L/sec and then released to irrigators throughout the year.

Netco Pumps were asked to build this station as a complete construction including all civil and concrete works. The project included the construction of a large oblong-shaped precast concrete wet well into a riverbank of hard bluestone rock which would house 6 large submersible pumps, two of which are powered through variable speed drives and the others run at 4 pole speed via soft starters.

The pump of choice for this project was large Sulzer submersible channel impeller pumps pumping at approximately 400 L/sec and 50 metres head and the efficiency of these pumps coupled to an IE3 rated submersible electric motor made them hard to beat whilst providing a solution that would work during extreme flooding events associated with this site. All pumps were installed on auto-coupling pedestals for ease of removal and the controls were housed in a shed situated above the 100-year flood level on the top side of the access road.