How to Reduce Losses in a Water Distribution Network

Losses in water distribution networks represent an expense that today’s society should not allow. They represent a social discredit – water is a commodity and a necessity – an environmental error – we take water from our ecosystems to waste it – and also an economic surcharge. This last point affects the economy of all taxpayers. You don’t just pay for the water you consume, but also for the water that is lost along the way. While domestic water consumption decreases year after year, due to tax increases and, above all, greater collective awareness on this issue, losses do not.

To put it in numbers, according to Iagua, in 2014 – the last year with data – the equivalent of the entire volume of the reservoirs of Catalonia was lost in our networks, or, what is the same, the domestic consumption of 13.8 million people.

The lack of investment in the network infrastructure is notable, nearly 40% of it is more than 30 years old and nearly a quarter more than 40. Given this lack of financial resources, technology must serve to help solve this problem. It is clear that when faced with a broken pipe, you can only either fix it or replace it, but today it is unknown where these permanent drains are occurring.

Mainly, the losses of a water distribution network can be reduced in the following ways:

1. Predicting failures: there are several reasons that deteriorate a pipe, but mainly they are corrosion, overpressure or bad connections. Therefore, if you have equipment that measures leakage currents that affect the pipes, vibrations or pressure, you can constantly monitor the actual state of the network.
2. Detecting leaks: the first step to avoid losses is to know where they occur, therefore, sensors can be installed to measure flow rates or pressures in the different valves of the system. In the event of any incident, different readings will be obtained at one point and another. This will imply a faster action and, in the long run, better maintenance plans both analytically and operationally.
3. Acting remotely: in the same way that you can know where there is a problem, you can deploy intelligent and remote instrumentation that allows you to manipulate the network as appropriate, either in planned routine operations or by initiative/programming of the device itself as manager of a specific event, for example, changing the opening of a solenoid valve according to the flow rate that is being read from the pipe.

Currently, technology has advanced enough to be able to deploy remotely managed and battery-powered equipment throughout a network. That is, equipment that fulfills its function, with easy management and affordable maintenance.

However, it is evident that in order to implement a system of these characteristics, the appropriate tools must be selected for it. The environment to be controlled is very demanding, with very distributed, unattended and usually aggressive points for the installed equipment – wastewater or treatment plants -.

Therefore, it must be taken into account that the Software plus Hardware solution as a whole must include at least:

• Equipment with ruggedized hardware to work in these environments and with the possibility of working for years without the need to be manipulated or maintained.
• Redundant and secure communications, water distribution networks are critical infrastructures.
• Software systems that work taking into account the geoposition of the deployed assets and with the capacity to cross data from diverse sources, for example, the pressures of the equipment in the field with that of the pumping of the intermediate installations.

The ROI presented by a solution of this type is clear: it allows optimizing maintenance costs to be able to focus them on renewing the infrastructure and on the savings in losses that are obtained. That is, not only is there an environmental and social return, but also an economic one.

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