As Australia moves into 2025, it’s undeniable that the climate continues to change, and not for the better. Here, Warwick Lorenz of Australian Pump Industries, provides the company’s view on the future challenges and what Aussie is doing, in their modest way, to do their best to fight fire, floods and drought!
30 years ago, when Australian Pump Industries was founded in a shed in my backyard, the little team of four people had no understanding that we were heading for major changes in the weather. Even when we did hear about it, years later, we didn’t believe it! Australia’s always been used to periodic droughts, floods and bushfires. What we didn’t forecast back then was the progressive temperature increases and the rising prevalence of dramatic weather events.
We’re putting this story together for Power Equipment Magazine because we believe that the readers, the backbone of Australia’s small engine-powered equipment businesses, deal with these issues every day.
It’s December 2024 and we see Malibu on fire with 18,000 people fleeing their homes. It’s the danger of fires spreading throughout California and fires in Bolivia wreaking havoc across half the country. We see all this on television, just waiting to see the next massive flood, mudslide or other dramatic weather event anywhere from Valencia to China. It’s the new world!
Aussie Pumps’ Can-Do Attitude
It’s easy to get depressed when you see those headlines but here at Aussie Pumps our R&D Department, and the inspiration of the people we work with, are a big part of how we guide product development. Operating now from a 3-1/2 acre warehouse and factory facility in Sydney’s boutique Norwest Business District, we’ve developed significantly faster production build programs, state of the art test equipment, and a facility that enables us to significantly develop products that leave our competitors, not just in Australia but anywhere in the world, way behind.
Made For Australia
The focus on our company is on delivering robust and reliable products that are well-designed and built to withstand the harsh Australian environment. That continues to be the key driving factor for the company’s success.
When we started out in the urban interface Sydney suburb of Arcadia, we had a taste of what it is to see bushfires sweep through the district. That taught us a lesson about preparation, not just for ourselves but also applied to the urban interface dwellers, not just in Australia but in other parts of the world as well. It isn’t just our great island continent where people like to live amongst the trees in peace and quiet, away from the busy hub of busy cities.
The World’s Best Fire Pump
After that lesson, we seriously studied the competitor pumps that were available. Fire pumps are nothing new to Australia’s power equipment industry. Everybody knows about them. We know that if you have a Honda engine on the pump, chances are the pump might be OK. Yes, Honda dominates because of its reliability and the ‘starts first time, every time’ claim, which we have proved to be largely correct.
Our Engineers started testing pumps and realised that there was a great opportunity to actually put a fire pump on the market that would outperform and out feature all competitors. We called it the Fire Chief and went to work with castings from Japan’s leading die-cast aluminium facility. That’s right, we started with the best materials and the best components from the beginning.
We also built in features like flanged suction ports that could be varied from 1 ½” to 2” and even 3” to fit the body. We also flanged the 3-way outlet, providing the user of the pump with a 1 ½” outlet, for serious work, and two 1” outlets to be used for ‘wetting down’.
Most of all, we spent a lot of money on a super heavy duty impeller that has a bigger diameter than competitors, providing 25% more pressure. You can compare the performance curves of Davey and Onga pumps, two veterans of the pump industry, against our pump and you’ll see our impeller is bigger diameter, hence the bigger pressure. We also put a 2” inlet on the pump, giving us a 25% more flow advantage compared to pumps by those old-timers with their 1 ½” inlet.
With a pump of that quality and performance, we knew we were on a winner and when Honda match-tested the performance of the pump against the capability of a GX160 5.5hp engine, we were very happy. Honda approved it, as they have approved all our products as we developed new Honda-powered products over the years.
ISO 9001
Yes, Australian Pump Industries (Aussie Pumps) is an ISO 9001 Quality Certified company. We were one of the first Australian companies in this sector to attain that certification and have maintained it for decades. We’ve never failed an audit and the Quality Culture is spread right throughout the organisation in all areas of performance. Customer satisfaction is the core of our quality program.
Fire Pump Performance
Having proved that we could build a better pump than our competitors, we moved on to twin impellers with the culmination of that being a big 4” pump that does 135 metres head and a whopping maximum flow of almost 800 lpm. It’s a monster!
All of that powered by a Honda GX390 electric start engine with a 16 litre long range fuel tank built in for good measure. It has a 4” inlet, three way outlet (2 x 3” 1 x 4”).
It’s surprising that any of our major bush fire fighting authorities haven’t picked it up.
To summarise, Aussie now leads the field for quality and performance. It’s capped off with a five year warranty on all their Aussie QP pump range including the fire pumps.
Where To?
The reality is we don’t know. We know we deal with problems as they arise, fire, flood and drought. That inspires us to develop bigger and better product.
We believe in fair prices for a great product. We object on ethical grounds to inflated prices with fake discounts, as offered by many in the trade these days. We cringe when we see a fire pump with a fake list price of around $2,000 when we know what it actually costs to make them and we know the fake discount (up to $900). What can you say?
Do they think people are stupid? No doubt the ACCC will look into this one day when some irritated consumer realises they have been ripped off when they thought they were getting bargain. Here at Aussie we don’t do things like that.
