About Jex Silt Pumping Ltd
Peter Jex, owner of Jex Silt Pumping started his dredging career in 1972 as an apprentice engineer for a company called Dredging and Construction based in Kings Lynn Norfolk. Peter worked on equipment such as Drag lines, Cranes, Dredgers, Suction dredgers and traction engine dredgers. With traction engine dredgers there would be one either side of a river and a door would be dragged for one side to the other dragging the silt to one side from where it could be removed.
In order to hone his knowledge and perfect the desilting process, in 1985 Peter was involved in trials at the Suger Beet factor in Bury St Edmonds. There he did his first pumping trials, testing different forms of displacement pumps, suction pumps and hydraulic pumps to see which method would pump silt from one lagoon to another (at that time the air pump we use today had not yet been developed).
From the trials he found that the best pumps (at the time) were piston displacement pumps which could pump the silt through pipes of some distance.
The main problems that Peter encountered with these systems was that the pipework required for pumping the silt was quite heavy and needed buoyancy aids to float the pipes across water. Additionally, using this method with the piston displacement pumps, blowback was sometimes encountered and the pipes would split.
Other problems included the need for a huge amount of water, with a very low solids to water ratio, 10-15% solids to 85-90% water. When used in conjunction with dewater bags, it used to take quite some time to separate the silt from the water. In addition, some of these methods required a flocculent, a chemical that created separation of the solids from the water inside the dewatering bag. A very inefficient and environmentally unfriendly process.
Before creating Jex Silt Pumping, Peter also worked for the National Rivers Authority (now the Environment Agency). From there he joined an earth moving company working on flood defences around Norfolk. Peter worked on the Runway at Port Stanley in the Falklands as well as doing landscaping work there and also spent two years in Portugal landscaping and shaping golf courses there.
So around 2005, Peter developed a system of dredging and desilting that can pump silt upto 800 metres from the project site, using very little water to transport the solids away. Much reducing the need for dumper trucks and decreasing the environmental impact of the dredging process. It took a few years of development but by 2010 Peter had honed the system to be one of the first silt pumping system in use in the UK, much reducing the environmental impact of dredging operations.
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