The challenge
The municipality treats and pumps water to a growing district, but billed consumption trails production by a wide margin every month. Some of the gap is physical leakage in ageing pipes, some is meter under-reading and estimated bills, and some is unauthorised connections. Nobody can say how much of each, or where.
Its wells, reservoirs and booster stations run on local float switches and timers. Operators drive between sites to read levels and reset tripped pumps. Reservoirs overflow at night while low-lying zones sit at excessive pressure, which is exactly when leaks grow fastest.
Without zone-level measurement, every repair budget is spread thinly across the whole network instead of where the water is actually being lost.
Our approach
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Baseline audit
We walk the network with the operations team, map every well, reservoir, pump station and bulk meter, and build a water balance per supply zone. That baseline is what every later result is measured against.
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District metered areas
The network is divided into district metered areas, each with a bulk flow meter and pressure logger on its inlets, so night-time minimum flow, the clearest leak signal there is, can be measured zone by zone.
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Site automation
An RTU goes into each remote site to read flow, pressure, reservoir level, chlorine and pump status. Wells and lift pumps run against reservoir level instead of timers, and pressure is reduced overnight.
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SCADA, alarms and the fix list
Every site reports into a hot-standby redundant SCADA system over IEC 60870-5-104. Alarms are verified and acknowledged with notes, and each zone’s night-flow trend ranks where field crews should go first.
System architecture
How the layers connect, from the people using the system down to the equipment in the field.
- Control-room operators
- Field crews
- Management reports via web server
- Hot-standby redundant SCADA pair
- Map-based station view
- Time- and event-based reports
- IEC 60870-5-104 over GSM/LTE
- Local logging during outages, auto-sent on reconnect
- RTUs at wells and reservoirs
- PLCs at pump stations
- Local HMI panels
- Bulk flow meters
- Pressure and level sensors
- Chlorine, turbidity and pH
- Pump energy analysers
What we’d deploy
- RTUs with IEC 61131-3 logic and onboard data logging
- PLCs for pump-station sequencing and well-pump protection
- Hot-standby redundant SCADA server pair
- Bulk meters and pressure loggers on every district metered area inlet
- Water-quality monitoring for chlorine, turbidity and pH
- Energy analysers on pump motors to track kWh per kilolitre pumped
Target outcomes
Targets we would design and report against, not measured results from a named client. Actual results depend on the baseline established in the audit.
