Welsh Water Extends Monitoring Pilot

Four months after appointing Detectronic to deliver a smart sewer-network monitoring pilot, Dwr Cymru Welsh Water has extended the current study area around the village of Llay near Wrexham to include the Gwersyllt area of the Gresford catchment.

Focused on preventing flooding and reducing pollution events across its network by identifying blockages sooner, Welsh Water has made the decision to broaden the catchment area to assist in the development of a target operating model which can be rolled out in other catchments.

States Jen Gorniak, business development manager at Detectronic: “Based on additional site visits and reviewing the catchment area with Welsh Water, we will install another eight of our telemetered MSFM Depth/Velocity flow monitors and one telemetered MSFM rain gauge within the Gwersyllt area of the Gresford catchment.

“Monitoring of the extended catchment area includes a further two Combined Sewer Overflows and three areas previously affected by flooding.

“We are also monitoring both ‘legs’ of the duplicate sewer that passes through the majority of the Gresford catchment to ensure we gather robust data that will help improve operational network performance and ultimately identify how and where Welsh Water will be able to predict blockages in future.”

Concludes Andrew Wild, Welsh Water’s North Wales Sewerage Manager: “Working with Detectronic on this pilot exercise has so far proved very useful. It is helping us to increase our overall understanding of how the network performs and providing us with advanced notice of any issues before they develop. A few weeks after the initial pilot commenced, we soon realised that to complete the picture we would need to monitor the catchment as a whole and, by the end of September, that is exactly what we will have achieved.”