The Municipal Water and Sanitation Services of Sintra (SMAS de Sintra) will acquire a 9-tonne combined septic-tank cleaning and sewer-cleaning vehicle, in an investment estimated at 192 thousand euros, to reinforce operational capacity in the area of maintenance of wastewater drainage networks, as disclosed in a press release.
According to the same source, with a fleet subjected to significant wear due to the numerous daily requests, the new vehicle will replace a sewer-cleaning vehicle with 24 years of activity and around 240,000 kilometers, which is already inoperative with no feasible repair.
The vehicle to be acquired will address the needs in the domain of cleaning and unclogging collectors: in many cases, there are requests where a light vehicle has little capacity and a heavy one cannot perform the work, because the streets are narrow for its size, making a medium-type 9-tonne vehicle necessary.
With an estimated overall cost of 192 thousand euros, including maintenance, the new vehicle will feature a circular cistern with a capacity of five thousand litres, two thousand for clean water and three thousand for dirty water (slurry), with the cistern discharge system by tilting, being equipped with a suction pump with a flow rate of 400 m3/hour and a high-pressure pump with a flow rate around 80 litres/minute and maximum pressure of about 175 bar, as well as a high-pressure hose reel (with at least 70 metres) hydraulically driven and a secondary manually driven reel (with a 25-metre high-pressure hose).
This acquisition follows the purchase of a 19-tonne septic-tank cleaning vehicle, which represented an investment of around 256 thousand euros (including the maintenance plan). A purchase that proved essential due to the increasing number of requests, resulting in continuous use of the operational vehicles, whose fleet averages over 320 thousand kilometres.
This vehicle is equipped with a cistern with a total capacity of 8,300 litres, including an 8,000-litre dirty-water tank and a 300-litre tank for clean water, with hydraulic tilting to assist unloading and/or washing, in addition to being fitted with a high-pressure washing system and eight flexible suction hoses.
