Smart water and sewer technologies, including real-time monitoring, analytics, and machine learning, are being used by many water and wastewater utilities to collect useful data, improve decision-making, and optimize infrastructure and resource utilization to ensure compliance with regulations. Even so, many agencies are still on the fence about whether these programs can offer safe and secure information that they themselves can provide.
For years this is a problem that the City of Lakewood’s water resources department grappled with. They even went as far as developing a spreadsheet program that would help analyze their pump system to make sure it ran as efficiently and as cost-effectively as possible.
“Until recent years, we relied on Excel spreadsheets to track and capture pump performances and motor efficiencies. The information helps our operators make better decisions in knowing which well or pump produces the most water using the least amount of energy,” said Derek Nguyen, Director of Water Resources for the City of Lakewood. “Although this information was helpful, it was not in real-time. As a result, we were operating our water system based on past data and not necessarily reflecting accurate and current pump performance information.”
Nguyen also explained that for water agencies, energy costs associated with water extraction and pumping into the distribution systems are often major costs. As such, the Lakewood Water Resources Department sought to understand its pumping operation better and reduce our energy usage.
While building spreadsheets and hand inputting data is one way of pulling this information together, it can be time consuming and miss some valuable data. In the past, only the big agencies could afford advanced monitoring and system optimization programs to solve problems and boost productivity, but that has changed almost overnight. Real-time monitoring has made it possible for even smaller agencies to use advanced technology, just like their bigger counterparts.
Lakewood Water Resources Department has over 20,300 service connections. The City maintains 180 miles of distribution pipelines, operates 11 drinking water wells and 15 booster pumps, and supplies approximately three billion gallons of water per year to 60,000 people.
Lakewood’s journey will be presented as a session at this spring’s CWEA annual conference. The session, titled “Flying Blind No More: Using Edge Analytics to Improve Pump Performance,” will feature Lakewood’s Nguyen and Specific Energy’s Ryan Hougham, who will discuss how Lakewood has improved the city’s pump performance by using Specific Energy’s Dynamic Pump Optimizer on seven of their well and booster pumping stations. This optimization allows Lakewood to monitor their pumps in real-time and better understand how they work together to pump water from its aquifer into its distribution system.
There is a lot of discussion around pump efficiencies and the challenges of meeting daily demand based on diurnal curves. One possible solution to this issue is the use of variable frequency drives, which can offer better process control and potentially lower energy costs.
However, operating pumps at lower speeds will reduce their design efficiencies and lead to higher energy costs.
“Most remedial systems focus on alarming, rather than root cause identification, and cannot provide insight into overall system performance,” said Hougham. “Data analytics of individual pump performance provides a holistic approach to lifecycle asset management and operation of these critical assets.”
This presentation demonstrates how analytics can be used in real time to ensure that systems are designed, operated, and maintained properly for the given service. It will also graphically illustrate how the condition of each pump gives the City the ability to pick better pumps to replace aged equipment.
“Unfortunately, most pump data collected at facilities is not being properly analyzed to give the operators, managers, and engineers who work with them the insights they need to run these systems optimally,” Hougham said. “This presentation will demonstrate how a powerful analytics platform can provide those insights, reduce energy expenditures, extend the useful life of equipment, and protect the environment by reducing unplanned outages.”
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