When Hawaiian musician Don Ho wrote the song "Tiny Bubbles," it's a safe bet he didn't have wastewater treatment plants on his mind. But tiny bubbles are the name of the game at an existing waste water treatment plant on Reno's Westside. There, builders are totally renovating the existing plant and installing new and more efficient pumps, basins, mechanical equipment, filters and motors to cut energy usage. The 41 million dollars project is only adding an extra 6 million gallons a day of treatment capacity to the existing 40 MGD plant, but the new equipment will cut operating costs and provide better filtration for the area's waste water. "Fine bubbles are better at oxygenating the water than larger bubbles," said project engineer Dave Michaut of Carollo Engineer's Reno office. "The fine bubbles have more surface area, so it's more efficient. You have to have enough air in there for the bugs to eat away the sewage."
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