RALEIGH, NC - Whether attending a wedding or simply taking a stroll, visitors to the Atlanta Botanical Garden in Gainesville, Ga., are likely to marvel at the lush, colorful plant life. Thanks to the city’s water department, they can rest assured the beautiful plants will never lack water.
Gainesville Department of Water Resources uses technology to make good on their pledge to deliver the best in customer service and quality. Their dedication to innovation has helped them stay at the forefront with water metering infrastructure, as they evolved from manual meter reads to automatic meter reading (AMR) to more effectively capture data.
“Our team understood the power information gives you to make decisions,” said the City of Gainesville’s Utility Senior Database/AMI Analyst Jeremy Rylee. “The more accurate and efficient you can be with collecting data, the faster you can put it to good use.”
Gainesville decided to embark upon a major network overhaul to streamline operations and enhance customer service. As a long-time customer of Sensus, a Xylem brand, the city chose to install a smart utility network to transition to remote monitoring and lay a foundation for future services.
Gainesville deployed the Sensus solution across more than 58,500 endpoints with Sensus SR® and iPERL® residential water meters and OMNI™ commercial water meters. The meters, combined with the two-way FlexNet® communication network, opened the doors for remote monitoring of water consumption and, in some cases, water loss.
“We used the near real-time data from the system to monitor for trends like continuous usage,” said Rylee. “When technicians saw something out of the ordinary, they could reach out to the customer to address the issue before it showed up on their water bill.”
The easily installed Hydroverse Insertion Flowmeter helps Gainesville account for water loss on an hourly basis in a district metered area.
The Gainesville team was so impressed with the system’s continuous use alerts that they sought to extend the benefits of data to customers with the Sensus Customer Portal. The secure, online portal allows residents and businesses to remotely monitor and make informed decisions about their water usage.
The department is also addressing water loss by creating a district metered area (DMA), a specific zone in their northern service territory. They recently installed four Sensus HydroverseTM Insertion Flowmeters by simply tapping an existing pipeline without any interruption to the water supply. This zone is now set up to account for water loss on an hourly basis.
“This gives us great system visibility in one particular zone where we can quantify non-revenue water and use the data to optimize operations,” said Rylee.
Efficient operations and timely data are not limited to one DMA. Gainesville has begun piloting Sensus ally® water meters and the Sensus® Smart Gateway Sensor Interface with pressure transducers for advanced pressure monitoring across several zones to ensure asset durability and water loss detection.
“It all goes back to innovation for us,” said Rylee. “We’re always looking for ways to get better for customers and the Sensus solution gives us the tools we need to find them.”
