Today is Dec 4:
#TreeLightingDay
#WildlifeConservationDay
#CheetahDay
#WorldWaterLossDay
#SantasListDay
#CabernetFrancDay
#SockDay
#DiceDay
#WearBrownShoesDay
#DayOfBanks
#DayOfRestForBlackWomen
#DragonAgeDay
#TunnellingDay
#CookieDay
Happy #worldwaterlossday everybody. Make sure to not lose water, or the naib of the sietch will take yours.
20. Lastly, there are so many tools out there, a lot of them free, to help you get started. There are a lot of communities and passionate people out there to help you. Not all of them work for free, though, so please remember that. We have to make a living somehow.
End of Tread.
#worldwaterlossday
19. Well, there is one excuse. Working for a water company that doesn't care, because most water companies are run like business monopolies, not public utilities. You do not water to be treated first and foremost like a source of profit, because the short term gain will prevail. #worldwaterlossday
18. This is just one way to do it. There are so many other solutions. There's thermal cameras, there are in-pipe sensors, there are even attempts to train dogs to detect leaks. You have many options so there's no excuse to not get started today. #worldwaterlossday
17. When you find the spot where the noise is greatest, get someone to dig it up, you'll most likely find a broken or leaky pipe there. Note, that it can be very difficult to get approval to dig from the city, so it's important to not get the location wrong. #worldwaterlossday
A Seba Hydrolux ground microphone kit.
16. These sensors also have correlation capabilities in software (some in hardware) which can help pinpoint leaks, provided you have proper GIS data. Regardless, you will want to use a dedicated correlator for the final detection and ground microphone,like the one below from Seba. #worldwaterlossday
15. Now, the way you use them depends on how many you can afford. Just 4? Put them somewhere, leave them for 1-3 nights, move them to a new area, repeat until you find strong noise. If you have 100 of them, leave them in one place forever to monitor for new leaks. #worldwaterlossday
A Gutterman noise logger
A HWM Permanet noise logger without the antenna attached
14. I use HWM PermaNet noise sensors which are a pain to maintain and have a now terrible web interface for management (version 2.0 was better). And some Gutterman sensors which are tasty to rodents, but are otherwise less of a hassle, perform a bit better and are more expensive. #worldwaterlossday
13. Now comes the fun part, you can't go and just inspect every cm of pipe, that won't work. What you want is to reduce the search area with other sensors. For example, noise loggers. You put them on a metal valve, or a home connection, and at night they listen for noise. #worldwaterlossday
12. OK, now you have the basic support systems needed to begin water loss detection. The DMAs help you pinpoint problem areas and the geodata helps you understand what pipes may be a problem, hint, it's the asbestos cement ones, the 100 year old ones or the cheap PE ones. #worldwaterlossday
11. The data you get from those flow meters has to be channeled into something. A database. Not an spreadsheet, but an actual database. And you need a system to handle data collection, analytics, etc. I recommend Ignition by Inductive Automation. It's not free but it's great #worldwaterlossday
A collection of Siemens MAG8000 flow meters.
10. As for what kind of flowmeter, I use Siemens MAG8000 ones, they are battery operated and quite unreliable unless you take really good care of them. And, let's face it, if you're reading this, you won't. But, if you have passionate people they will learn to repair them. #worldwaterlossday
9. Establishing such DMAs (District Metered Areas) allows you to better know how much water is going into an area versus how much much water you are billing to your customers. If there's a large discrepancy, you know you have a leak. #worldwaterlossday
8. You will want to monitor how much water is going into your network at various points. Use flowmeters, ether electromagnetic or sonic, to place at specific points in the network. Section off parts of it in such a way as to have clear inlets and outlets. These are DMAs. #worldwaterlossday
7. The support is found in tools like GIS, which hold georeferenced data about all the pipes in your network. I highly recommend #QGIS as a tool for this, it is amazing, it is free, and it will require other passionate people to populate with data. #worldwaterlossday
6. Assuming you have these people, you now need to equip them. They need tools to work with and there are a plethora out there to help you reduce water loss. But, again, it's important that you have those people to use the tools and that they are properly trained and supported. #worldwaterlossday
5. So, how do you find leaks that aren't gushing to the surface?
People. First an foremost, you need people who are at least somewhat interested in the subject and are determined to even the smallest degree to reduce water loss. Without this, nothing will help you. #worldwaterlossday
4. A single leak like the one you see in the previous post will cost you hundreds of thousands of euros a year in energy and water. Keep that in mind when considering if it's worth investing in reducing water loss. Finding just that one leak will offset most investments. #worldwaterlossday
Water leaking into an asbestos cement wastewater canal, as seen from a recording on a sewer inspection camera
3. That kind of loss is harder to detect, if all you do is go around looking for puddles in the street. Some can go undetected for years, because they can erode themselves into old wastewater canals and never reach the surface. This way, there is less damage, but more water loss #worldwaterlossday
Water gushing from the street at night, to nearly 6 meters in the air.
Picture of water leaking from a pipe, near the joint of another pipe, in three small streams of high pressure, there is a puddle forming beneath them.
2. Water loss detection can be hard, because it doesn't look like the picture on the left, but more like the picture on the right. The one on the right can go undetected for months, until it evolves into a full on rupture, leading to damage to the surrounding area, as seen above. #worldwaterlossday
A picture of a sinkhole filled with water that occured in Slanic Prahova in the spring of 2024.
1. It costs you more to ignore water losses in the long run. It may not seem like it does, but if a pipe leaks, it'll erode soil and eventually cause roads and building foundations to crumble. If you get to the point where the situation looks like the picture below, you are late #worldwaterlossday
Because it's #worldwaterlossday let me share a few tips about reducing water loss in a distribution network. Some of this was part of a presentation I gave at IoTWeek 2022 in Dublin.
Today is #worldwaterlossday , please remember that water is very important and clean water is increasingly harder to maintain in steady supply.
In addition, pressure your local government to renew water pipes in order to reduce losses and maybe actually invest in water loss detection. #IWA
