People enjoy their water in Lynchburg, Virginia. The city of nearly 80,000 is next to the James River, which residents use for boating, swimming, and fishing. Meanwhile, the City of Lynchburg Department of Water Resources is hard at work providing water, waste water, and storm water service to the community. The department uses innovative technologies to improve its efficiency — including Ignition by Inductive Automation®. Ignition is an industrial application platform with tools for building solutions in human-machine interface (HMI) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA).
Enhancing process reliability and increasing capacity are common issues facing water municipalities. On the one hand, community demographics are constantly evolving and water municipalities need to accommodate the impact to capacity requirements. At the same time, older systems that support pumping operations are not getting any younger and as control systems age, for example, it can become more time consuming to maintain equipment and more difficult to find replacement parts after systems have been in place for many years.
Technology has taken society leaps and bounds ahead of where it was a few decades ago. From the rise of smartphones, drone deliveries, to self-driving cars, a lot has changed in a short time.
When California’s AB2022 went into effect earlier this year, allowing the bottling of advanced purified reused water for educational purposes, Orange County Water District (OCWD) and Orange County Sanitation District began the #GetOverIt! campaign to continue to push for consumer acceptance of recycled water systems.
No technology innovations have received as much coverage over the past year as virtual (VR) and augmented realities (AR). Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant have us all talking to our devices and interacting with non-humans on a regular basis.
In drinking water treatment’s ongoing battle between disinfection and disinfection byproducts (DBPs), most water utility customers are oblivious to the process. One thing they do notice, however, is when their water smells or tastes bad. Here are some insights that can help water treatment plant (WTP) operators deal with their internal concerns about DBPs and residual chlorine or ammonia levels, as well as their external concerns about customer perceptions of water quality.
Operational savings realized through high-tech leak detection techniques could pay for your utility’s advanced leak detection equipment.
Launched last year, Mueller’s “Reliable Connections” slogan looks to unite the Company’s customers, engineers, and contractors with its business units, knowledge experts and service offerings in the water industry.
There is little doubt about the importance of taking turbidity readings as part of drinking water treatment. However, there are certain misperceptions about the associated requirements and procedures needed to confirm the validity of those readings. The major points of confusion seem to revolve around perception of the terms “approved,” “calibration,” and “validation.” Here is a quick synopsis on what you really need to know about meeting U.S. EPA Method 180.1: Determination of Turbidity by Nephelometry for accurate turbidity readings.
For years, I’ve been standing on my deck in San Francisco, looking south to Silicon Valley for innovation in water efficiency. But I’m starting to realize that I might have been gazing in the wrong direction. Maybe I need to turn around and look north, over the spires of the Golden Gate Bridge, toward the Emerald Triangle in Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties, the hotbed of California’s newly legalized commercial cannabis production.
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