In the week when the AMP Business Plans submitted by all of the UK water companies to Ofwat have flagged up the need to bear down continually on operational costs, a recent initiative by Hartlepool Water has highlighted a real opportunity for the utilities to make major savings and significantly reduce their maintenance expenditure.

The introduction of i2O Water’s Advanced Pressure Management technology has resulted in reduced demand, improved customer service and delivered major savings in operational costs in a remarkable payback time of just 5 months.

Part of Anglian Water Services Ltd, Hartlepool serves a population of more than 92,000 people through 700km of mains pipe, and stores up to 48 million litres of water to supply  its network. Pressure control has been at the heart of its network strategy for more than 30 years. With 26 District Zones (DZs) and 22 District Metered Areas (DMAs), HW already had 16 fixed outlet Pressure Reducing Valves (PRVs) which were fairly well optimised. but a heavy reliance on manual intervention kept operational costs high.

Some PRV performance issues required a quarterly minor service schedule which were carried out in addition to frequent manual pressure setting adjustments by HW technicians. Whilst this kept service levels high, it also meant high operational overheads.

Kevin Ensell, Water Operations Manager for Hartlepool Water said it had tried basic systems around reducing night pressures in the past which had not proven robust. The firm had decided instead to look at another approach with a more intelligent solution that could increase efficiency across multiple areas of the business, including operational cost, customer service, repair and maintenance. With a particular interest in the benefits of remote control, Hartlepool opted for  i2O Water – already successfully working with parent company Anglian and crucially, the only company with a proven tested solution.

As part of the Anglian Water Optimised Water Network (OWN) Trial, HW decided to trial i2O Water’s Automatic Optimisation solution to monitor the impact of improved pressure control on the the day-to-day operations of four DMAs on its network.

In January 2013 optimisation began - on one DMA i2O also monitored the PRV control space pressures to capture data to monitor the condition of the  PRV. The issue was of particular interest to Hartlepool to establish whether it would enable them to identify performance issues and schedule service requirements more effectively

Catherine Carlon, Operations Support Manager for Hartlepool Water said the firm wanted to see how i2O’s solutions could reduce the frequency of operational visits to adjust outlet pressure in the PRVs, and also reduce the number of customer contacts.

Cost saving in excess of £10,500 across four DMAs

The results showed a significant improvement in performance - optimising the DMAs stabilised critical point pressures, thereby reducing demand, improving customer service and removing the need for manual PRV adjustment.

Kevin Ensell, Operations Manager at Hartlepool Water commented:

“i2O Water enables us to do two revolutionary things. We can now optimise our water pressure continuously and automatically in line with agreed customer service levels throughout our network, and we can easily adjust critical point pressure at the click of a button through a secure internet connection.”

“The i2O solution proved to us that we can safely reduce our scheduled site visits, optimise our critical point pressure even further, and significantly lower customer contact, saving us tens of thousands of pounds a year on just these four PRVs alone. And although leakage was not a key driver for us on this project, we’ve been surprised by how much more i2O’s optimisation can save us in this area as well.”

By using the PRV condition monitoring data provided by the i2O system, Hartlepool has been able to move away from a reliance on frequent service visits, which have now been cut from quarterly to annually without impacting customer service or reliability.

The company has also seen demand savings of 361m³/d across the four DMAs. Based on a marginal water cost of around 8p/m³, the reduction in daily demand equates to an annual cost saving in excess of £10,500 for HW across the four DMAs.

The water company is now planning to install additional i2O systems to extend coverage to more than 35 per cent of their total network in future AMPs - with i2O’ becoming Hartlepool’s pressure management solution of choice.

Kevin Ensell said:

 “We’ll be investing more funds this year to extend the scope of i2O’s benefits more widely across our network.”

Catherine Carlon added that Hartlepool would be looking to install i2O’s PRV Remote Control to reduce operational costs and using i2O’s condition monitoring capabilities on all new PRVs as standard.

The success of the project will undoubtedly be of major interest to the other UK water companies. Technological innovations which demonstrate such significant improvements in performance and associated cost reductions are set for increasing uptake throughout AMP6 with its emphasis on maintenance of existing assets rather than capital and concrete-intensive led solutions.

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