Water pollution monitoring

Effective water pollution monitoring is a serious and ongoing mission for every UK water and sewerage company (WaSC). Done strategically and responsibly, water pollution monitoring can potentially prevent damaging sewage spills & pollutions, protect and enhance the environment, support compliance and preclude hefty fines. Done incorrectly and arbitrarily, it can spell both environmental and financial disaster.

 Underperformance on sewage spills and pollutions

Back in July, the Environment Agency (EA) issued its annual report. In that report, it described WaSCs’ efforts to protect the environment as “simply unacceptable”. It went on to highlight that only one of England’s nine major WaSCs is currently performing at the required level and overall industry performance has declined with serious pollution incidents actually increasing in 2018.

The EA’s chair, Emma Howard Boyd, also stated that she and her team are “not seeing dramatic improvements in 2019” either.

As a result of its findings, the EA made the decision to strengthen its regulatory approach in relation to spills and pollutions and launched a new programme entitled ‘Improving Water Company Performance’.

 Water pollution monitoring done right

Water pollution monitoring is something we’re pretty good at here at Detectronic. In fact, we (and our clients!) see ourselves as experts on the topic.

One of our key objectives is, and has always been, to help WaSCs prevent sewage spills and pollutions with our specialist monitoring solutions. We have a number of different solutions available for a wide variety of applications, but our latest product development – DetecAnalytics – takes water pollution monitoring to the next level: it allows WaSCs to predict what will happen in their wastewater sewer network.

Anticipating incidents with DetecAnalytics before they actually occur is already enabling WaSCs to enhance self-reporting and improve asset management which, in the long-term, delivers better operational, environmental and financial performance.

Predictive analytics

DetecAnalytics is our AI-powered predictive analytics tool for wastewater sewer networks and water recycling centres. Created in partnership with Royal HaskoningDHV and employing their Aquasuite software, DetecAnalytics is the future for water pollution monitoring.

It is an AI-powered analyst and autopilot that empowers WaSCs to make fact-based decisions quickly to improve processes and performance. This includes reducing operating costs, lowering capital investment and enabling proactive maintenance, warning of leaks, bursts, overflows, spills and pollution incidents.

Once connected with our flow meters and level monitors, DetecAnalytics uses smart algorithms, real time data, historical data sets and information from other sources such as rainfall and translates it into actionable insights. Machine learning technology makes dry weather flow predictions and uses the additional data to predict future flows and identify anomalies in the network. This allows any WaSC to predict what will happen within a specific catchment or a water recycling centre at any point in time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Water pollutions and spills can become a thing of the past!

 Find out more about DetecAnalytics and our other Sewer Network Monitoring systems.