While water utilities must process, monitor and meet certain regulatory water quality requirements at a plant before sending final treated water into the distribution system, they also have to measure quality at the pretreatment stage, which is often affected by localized environmental changes. At the end of treatment, this now high-quality water enters the water distribution network and is regarded as stable, although ingress of chemical compounds, and environmental contaminants such as from farming and industrial sources, together with common pipeline construction materials, can affect water quality as it flows through the network. To safeguard quality within distribution networks, water is spot tested using hand-held grab sampling methods that have been employed since the 1960’s. These methods are time-consuming, costly to operate and do not offer any real-time value to a utility.
By contrast, smart digital sensor solutions placed in-network to monitor water quality provide the essential insights needed to ensure the quality of the water a utility puts into the network is consistently maintained up to the point that it reaches the tap in real-time. When sensors are strategically deployed in the drinking water distribution network, the insights can be used to respond swiftly and limit disruption of service should water quality levels drop below a predefined threshold. These cellular-enabled, low-powered water quality sensors provide real-time, accurate high-resolution water quality data. This data is also useful to manage public health concerns if water quality becomes compromised, pinpointing the location of a contamination event.
Why is water quality monitoring across the complete water cycle important?
Garry Tabor (G.T.): If you think about monitoring, and specifically analytical monitoring of water quality in any aspect of water treatment, it’s fair to say that historically we know a lot about the process of abstraction of water, whether it be volume or the quality of that water we are extracting.
Once water arrives inside the treatment plant, it has to be treated and prepared for the public. We’re pretty good at that process, too. Pretreatment challenges from the environment and new pollutants create many future treatment challenges, but we are learning to evolve with them.
Water quality instrumentation is focused very much on process control of all the different methodologies we use to polish the water, filter the water, and disinfect the water. The final part of this process is the journey from the water treatment plant to the tap. This is the one part of the journey where our ability to ensure water quality is maintained to standards has failed to keep pace with digital smart water technology innovation.
Even in 2024, we know remarkably little about this journey and what happens to the water before it reaches your tap, and what’s become apparent to everybody in the water sector over the last 10 years is that we need to pay much closer attention to this critical part of the process. Failure to act here poses an existential risk to our current model of utility drinking water.
Aging infrastructure is a major concern. It’s porous, it leaks due to continuous ground movement, has ingress of all sorts of things that affect the quality of the water that’s being delivered to the tap. As a consequence of that, if you look at social media and listen to public perception, there’s a distrust in the product (drinking water) and the provider (the utility).
Consequently, smart water connects everything throughout the entire process. It allows you to measure the water quality within a distribution system when it leaves the water treatment plant all the way to the tap. With in-network water quality monitoring, we can take every piece of captured data and link it up with all of the other processes giving the water company total visibility from source to tap.
Of course, this allows the water utility to see at a granular level what’s going on in their network related to water quality, but it also enables them to convey that information to the consumer to improve trust in utility water and rates of satisfaction.
