Service: Investigating unaccounted for water on industrial estates
Benefits: Identify genuine use of water that is not properly accounted for due to missing, inaccurate or broken meters. Identify illegal use of water from unknown connections, fire supplies etc. The benefits arise from increased revenue opportunities and more accurate leakage estimates.
The situation: The first client water company identified a DMA that was almost entirely comprised of a large industrial estate containing supplies to 250 separate units. Analysis of the night flow and average daily flow into the area indicated leakage on the water distribution network, as well as spikes in demand that could not be accounted for by logging metered supplies.
The second client asked Invenio to survey a DMA that contained an industrial estate with 52 known connections.
The project: Invenio Systems installed Stop.Watch loggers on all known supplies for a period of two weeks. The sum of the estimated flows was compared to the flow through the district meters.
Outcome: We identified several unmetered fire supplies that were taking water on a regular basis, an open bypass around a meter to a large user, broken meters, and several unknown connections.
In the first case, the leakage in the DMA was halved. In the second case, unaccounted for spikes in demand were attributed to unknown connections. In both cases there was a revenue benefit.
Leave a comment