"There is no life without water."
- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist
Municipal water utilities have one of the most important—and unappreciated—tasks in civilization. They bring water to citizens located far from rivers or streams; located instead in apartment buildings, houses and businesses along city streets and highways.
There is indeed, “no life without water.” But to be useful, that water has to be stored, distributed when needed, and contained. For most organizations today, whether commercial or municipal, there is no industrial life without data. But that data must be available, understandable and actionable. It’s amazing to learn that more than 50% of businesses (and this could include municipalities as well) have more data than they have the data analytics capacity to handle or analyze effectively.
Think about it—drowning in that data flood is like letting half the city’s water supply flow straight into the sewer! Data that could be used to trigger alarms that warn of a leak or a pump crash; data that could alert technicians to a valve that was stuck, or to head of a pump failure by seeing its temperature exceed safe levels BEFORE it fails.
Because when those things happen, people are without water for drinking, bathing and cooking.
And they call the office.
Mad.
With our cloud-native Zedi IIoT platform for water management you can connect to whatever monitoring hardware you have—it’s hardware agnostic. Now you’re getting your data collected into one database, securely backed up and protected.
You will always need to have your emergency response ready, but avoiding those emergencies all together is a giant step in a great direction. Here’s where the real difference begins—asking yourself, “What data analytics do I need to become more efficient, to improve the flow of work—and water—and to make better planning decisions?”
We can start with alarms. Set up to alert the right authorized end users for specific problems; for times when water pressures rise or drop outside of preset parameters; when pumps stop running, or when they begin to overheat or slow down; when valves stick; when tank levels drop too low; or anything else you need to know.
Instead a long list of employees making regular rounds and either checking locations that are working fine or stumbling upon something that’s been off or leaking for hours, you’ll know at a glance what’s working fine and what’s not. You can reroute or stop water away from a broken pipe before it floods the neighborhood. You can check on reservoir levels and reroute incoming water before the level runs dry. You can make sure your treatment chemicals are supplied and properly injected, knowing right away if there’s an issue—keeping your people, and the communities you serve healthy and safe.
Monitoring and Actionable Analytics Pay for Themselves
Fast data and control let you fix most issues while they’re small. They also keep you from wasting precious water for hours before finding a leak.
Collected data about repeat issues with a pipe or a pump station can even inform budget agencies as to where to allocate funds for updates and larger repairs. Which leads us to the flexibility with our IIoT platform; it can easily and quickly scale to fit the growth or change in your community to be sure it's the right fit for your needs.
