Tackling water loss

Water loss through leaks and non-rev­enue water are a glob­al issue of mon­u­men­tal scale. A 2018 Con­sumer Coun­cil for Water report revealed that in Eng­land alone more than three bil­lion litres of water are lost from leak­ing infra­struc­ture every day, mak­ing water leak­age the num­ber-one con­cern for UK water util­i­ties’ cus­tomers.

Despite sig­nif­i­cant man­pow­er-dri­ven efforts to reduce leak­age, it has actu­al­ly con­tin­ued to increase in recent years. The UK gov­ern­ment has now put for­ward the scary sce­nario that the coun­try could face water short­ages by 2050. This is why it has pushed water reg­u­la­tor Ofwat to exert pres­sure on UK water util­i­ties to step up their efforts and reduce leak­age by 15 per cent over the com­ing five-year asset man­age­ment peri­od (AMP7) and force heavy invest­ment pro­grammes.

Due to the cost of pipe replace­ment, which can be hun­dreds of thou­sands of pounds per mile, find­ing and fix­ing leaks as ear­ly as pos­si­ble is the only way to reduce water loss sus­tain­ably. But present meth­ods are not suit­able as armies of leak oper­a­tives assist­ed by low-tech­nol­o­gy tools can only scratch the sur­face.

“A host of new meth­ods and tech­nolo­gies are avail­able – satel­lite imagery, trac­er gas leak detec­tion, drones and smart meter­ing, to men­tion a few – and can be use­ful tools in the tool­box of any util­i­ty. How­ev­er, we main­tain that the most effec­tive approach remains the large-scale deploy­ment of ful­ly cor­re­lat­ing acoustic sen­sors on the water net­work,” says Uri Guter­mann, spokesman of leak detec­tion tech­nol­o­gy spe­cial­ist Guter­mann.

Full cor­re­la­tion means cloud servers receive dai­ly time-syn­chro­nised sound record­ings from the pipe net­work which they sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly cor­re­late with each oth­er and can hence auto­mat­i­cal­ly iden­ti­fy even small leaks, based on their unique noise pro­file, and pin­point their exact loca­tion on the pipe.

“We were the first to intro­duce full cor­re­la­tion in fixed net­works 15 years ago and have since installed more than 300 projects around the world,” says Mr Guter­mann, empha­sis­ing that com­mon­ly seen knee-jerk invest­ments and quick-fix strate­gies are not sus­tain­able long-term solu­tions.

“Leak reduc­tion should be a long-term strat­e­gy and so should the invest­ment deci­sions in leak detec­tion tech­nol­o­gy. There is no rea­son why a sig­nif­i­cant, sus­tain­able reduc­tion in water loss can’t be achieved depend­ing on how dense­ly you install ful­ly cor­re­lat­ing log­gers and how quick­ly you react to leak alarms.”

The third-largest city in France, Lyon, cov­ered 1,200 kilo­me­tres of pipe net­work with Guter­mann log­gers in 2015 and reduced non-rev­enue water from 21 to less than 14 per cent in just three years.

“We can see a par­a­digm change in the UK too,” says Mr Guter­mann. “In recent months, sev­er­al UK water util­i­ties have start­ed to deploy Guter­mann log­gers on a large scale to mon­i­tor crit­i­cal neigh­bour­hoods or entire towns and cities per­ma­nent­ly.”

Guter­mann places the utmost impor­tance on data avail­abil­i­ty and result accu­ra­cy of a per­ma­nent mon­i­tor­ing solu­tion. For this rea­son, until now its tech­nol­o­gy has relied on its own radio infra­struc­ture to lift data from under­ground pipes to above-ground data servers.

“The need for radio repeaters installed on lamp­posts has remained a nec­es­sary nui­sance to achieve max­i­mum sys­tem per­for­mance,” Mr Guter­mann con­cedes. “We are there­fore excit­ed about the launch of our NB-IoT log­ger at the start of the fourth quar­ter this year, mit­i­gat­ing the need for repeaters and gate­ways, and sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduc­ing sys­tem pur­chase and main­te­nance costs.”

Guter­mann has iden­ti­fied NB-IoT as the most suit­able inter­net of things com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy for its pur­pos­es that will enable the com­pa­ny to send data straight from the log­ger under­ground to servers above ground through the cel­lu­lar net­work, while main­tain­ing a log­ger bat­tery life of more than five years. This com­ple­ments an over­all vision to focus on a water leak­age prob­lem that is glob­al in its extent, but espe­cial­ly crit­i­cal in the UK.

Mr Guter­mann con­cludes: “Leak detec­tion tech­nolo­gies have come a long way, with per­ma­nent, cor­re­lat­ing acoustic solu­tions being the most cost and result-effec­tive method, and soon to be even more attrac­tive through the har­ness­ing of the inter­net of things in com­bi­na­tion with cloud com­put­ing.

“If util­i­ties adopt a strate­gic mind­set in deploy­ing mod­ern, ful­ly cor­re­lat­ing acoustic fixed net­works, I’m con­fi­dent we can over­come the con­cert­ed glob­al cri­sis that is water leak­age.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.gutermann-water.com