Continuous Leak Monitoring Advances Smart Water Intelligence

Jackie Lemmerhirt, Vice President, Software for Mueller Systems, explains the move to continuous leak monitoring and the necessity of effective leak detection in pipeline rehabilitation.

The following is an excerpt from a Q&A with Water Online Radio. Click on the Radio Player above to hear the full interview.

Water Online Radio: Explain how Mueller’s automated leak detection works?

Jackie: We're moving away from the typical lift and shift leak detection model, and moving to continuous leak monitoring. We have built a logger board that listens to the water through the pipes, just below the hydrants at the municipality. We monitor adjacent hydrants and listen to the acoustic sound and look for variations in that sound, and determine that there's a leak, when we see a variation.

That's a continuous process, and we monitor it from a host site. The data comes through our AMI RF network, and it's there every day for the utility user to look at and see if there's a leak on its system.

Water Online Radio: What's the benefit to someone having continuous monitoring versus lift and shift?

Jackie: Well, lift and shift is only a temporary measurement. You put it in the ground and listen for the sound for a period of time. It could be a day, a week, and then you move it to another location. It could happen that a leak occurs the day you move it.

With a continuous system, we have a very low-cost logger device that fits right on top of the hydrant cap, that never has to be removed, and you never have the chance of missing a leak, because it's always in place, and it's always monitoring.

Water Online Radio: How does the software work?

Jackie: Software is the key to the whole solution. We’re monitoring the data on a continuous basis and the data is being delivered every day through our network to a host server. It's the software that does all that processing and identifies the areas with a leak, and presents that to the utility user, so they can then go and take action on that leak. The software is really the view into the entire network…

Click on the Radio Player above to hear the full interview.