A combination of water scarcity and the desire to provide exceptional service has driven water utility managers to be focused more than ever on acquiring accurate, real-time insight into their distribution systems. Operators face a natural hurdle, however, when using traditional center-line electromagnetic flow meters, which don’t account for velocities that vary across a pipe. Fortunately, a solution has emerged to address the issue.
A lot has changed over the past 15 years. Back in the early 2000s, many utilities weren’t interested in understanding what was in their water beyond the contaminant and disinfection byproduct levels they were regulated to comply with. But as Pat Whalen, President and CEO of LuminUltra, explains in this ACE 2018 Water Talk interview, a steady stream of ongoing education and the modern data storage and analytics that cloud computing provides, has developed some rabid fans eager to explore the microbiology of their water systems.
Beyond the existential philosophy implications, the consequences of a pipeline leaking in a forest when no one is around highlight the desirability of leak detection systems in water distribution utilities as a whole. As the following experiences show, leak detection can have its entertaining side. On the other side of the coin, however, the consequences of not monitoring leaks can also trigger a tsunami of costs far beyond the expense of pipeline repair alone.
The key to high rate clarifiers such as inclined plate settlers is flow distribution says Tom Grubb, Regional Manager with Meurer Research. “Each inclined plate is like a miniature little sedimentation basin,” Grubb told Water Online in a recent Water Talk interview at AWWA’s ACE 2018. “To get good effluent quality, it’s critical that you have the same flow to each plate.”
Big Data is more than a marketing buzzword. It’s become an essential tool for helping utility operators prioritize capital investments, manage network assets, and provide a higher level of service to customers.
Purchasing low-priced equipment is easy. Purchasing equipment with good lifetime value is much more difficult — especially for managers of public utilities, who are required by their procurement procedures to entertain "or equal" bids.
The more a water utility knows about its current operations, the better equipped it can be to make more informed decisions about upcoming maintenance and capital replacement programs. Here are several key approaches to identifying cost-effective ways to make merging historical asset data and current operational data as the next step toward building a stronger, more resilient utility.
In this post, we’ll explor 13 winning sales strategies. But before you see the different sales strategies you can use to boost your sales, let’s first understand the different types of sales strategies that B2B companies use.
Everyone wants pathogen-free drinking water, and adding chlorine is a great way to get it. Unfortunately, the dirtier a water treatment plant (WTP)’s raw water inflow — in terms of natural organic matter (NOM) or microbial organisms — the more disinfection byproducts (DBPs) the chlorination process will generate in the form of trihalomethanes (THMs) and haloacetic acids (HAAs). Those DBPs increase the risk of non-compliance with the U.S. EPA’s Disinfectants and Disinfection Byproducts Rules. Choosing the right instrumentation to measure NOM through spectral absorption coefficients (SACs) can have a big impact on treatment strategies — in terms of both costs and compliance performance.
Municipal wastewater operations require significant energy to operate, but the biogas produced solely through anerobic digestion of sludge isn’t typically enough to offset the electricity and heat load demand at plants. Advanced anaerobic digestion technology, however, can change the equation so wastewater treatment plants can get closer to energy neutrality and in some cases even generate an excess.
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