MALTA — Saratoga Water Services, Inc. the company that provides drinking water for residents in the towns of Malta and Stillwater, is almost doubling in capacity in order to provide water to the growing amount of clients and residential developments in the works. In 2017 water consumption totaled in 195,461,050 gallons.
“We are permitted to pull so much water out of the ground and then that water is allocated to certain developments be it commercial or residential. In order to draw more that requires a new well or in our current case, a well pump upgrade to almost double the capacity of that well, how much water it can pump per minute,” said Marissa Mackay, Executive Vice President of Saratoga Water Services, Inc. and President of Luther Forest.
Saratoga Water Services located at 2 Stonebreak Rd. in Malta provides water to approximately 7,000 people, 45 businesses and 7 industrial customers, including Luther Forest Technology campus, home of GlobalFoundries.
“We need to store enough water for one full day’s use. When our average day of use gets close to our max tank capacity, we will need to invest in storage. Similarly with our pumps... we need to be able to pump enough water out to our customers, which is usually measured in Gallons Per Minute (GPM),” Mackay said.
The company gets roughly 500 GPM out of their current pump and hopes this upgrade will bring about 1,260 GPM.
“We recently invested in our distribution pumps to increase that capacity at our Cold Springs location,” she added.
Earlier this year the company added two more 50 HP distribution pumps to Cold Springs Pump House (CSPH), totaling five distribution pumps. Including another pump house the company has, Saratoga Water Services, is at a grand total of 3,585 GPM. The average demand is 506,370 gallons per a day.
Mackay says the cost of something like this is dependent upon the upgrade. “Storage, well pumps, distribution pumps or electrical or even controls... So many variables. We might have a minor communications upgrade that costs less than $10,000 or even less than $5,000, but on the other hand we may have a tank rehab/integration project that is close to $500,000 or even a full overhaul that will be upwards of $1.5 million,” Mackay said.
Hanson Well Drilling and Pump Co., with locations in Nassau, Chatham, Schenectady and Troy, is in charge of the well while Stilsing Electric, Inc. located in Rensselaer is working on the electrical side of things. The upgrade should be completed by the end of this week.
