The facts are frightening – especially since the problem can be avoided.
Consider this: As many as one in 10 patients hospitalized in the U.S. contracts an infection, according to the Wall Street Journal. That means nearly 2 million patients annually are infected by a bacterium or other agents.
The end result?
The cost is nearly 100,000 deaths and $6.5 billion in overall losses.
Hand washing is a long-standing means of fighting such infections. Doctors, nurses, and other hospital employees, as well as patients and guests, constantly wash their hands typically using hot water to do so.
The supply of hot water — and the time in which it is delivered – makes an efficiently designed domestic hot water system paramount in a hospital.
And that makes thermostatically controlled hot water flow control valves just what the doctors ordered. Unfortunately, these valves aren’t used as often as they should.
Normally, a domestic hot water system is manually balanced. Enough hot water flows at a rate to ensure that when a faucet is turned on, heated water is quickly delivered at a specified temperature set point – often 120 degrees Fahrenheit. To achieve this, the system is balanced with manually operated valves opened to produce the desired flow rate.
By Nick Tallos
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