Hydrex Underwater technology

Two months after a Canadian shipowner applied Ecospeed for the first time to one of his ro/ro vessels, he decided to send a second ro/ro ship into drydock in Las Palmas to have the old paint system on the  underwater hull completely stripped off to bare steel to be replaced with Ecospeed. Why the change? What are the advantages?

Ecospeed is guaranteed for 10 years and has a life expectancy of 25 years and will therefore protect these vessels against cavitation and corrosion damage for the remainder of their service life without the need for a full repainting during future drydockings. This is a very important benefit for this shipowner who needed to have his vessels repainted every year with his previous coating. Bad weather and expensive drydock costs in Canada made drydocking in the Mediterranean area the most feasible option for this yearly task. This cumbersome undertaking will no longer be necessary with the one time Ecospeed application that was carried out.

Another advantage of Ecospeed to both shipowner and shipyard is ease and flexibility of application. The entire system is applied in only two homogeneous coats and the overcoating time is from three or four hours to weeks or months. Therefore Ecospeed can easily be adapted to a shipyard’s schedule or to unpredictable weather conditions. By doing away with full repaints of the underwater hull during upcoming dockings, Ecospeed actively helps shipowners achieve the lengthening of the drydock interval that they strive for.

Further maintenance of the underwater hull is very easy, whether in-water or dry. This is due to the extremely tough surface which can be cleaned of even the heaviest fouling. In-water maintenance procedures can be repeated wherever and whenever needed during the vessel’s lifespan without causing damage or deterioration in the quality of the coating’s surface. In fact, each cleaning significantly improves the coating’s surface characteristics. The Ecospeed system keeps a ship’s underwater hull at optimum performance throughout its service life and helps shipowners save enormous amounts of money by reducing fuel consumption.

Ecospeed is 100% non-toxic throughout the entire service life of the vessel and lends itself to environmentally safe maintenance. The above mentioned reduced fuel consumption also leads to a corresponding reduction of the carbon footprint. The combination of these two factors offers significant value to the owner’s choice of Ecospeed in terms of a company’s corporate responsibility towards cleaner seas and environmentally safe ship hull husbandry.

It is therefore no surprise that the Canadian shipowner quickly saw the advantages of Ecospeed and decided to take the plunge and switch from the traditional coating he had been using.