Patrick Bonk
We recently published a new case study featuring global professional services company Stantec and their work with Wellington Water in New Zealand.
I’ve had the great opportunity to work with Senior Mechanical Engineer James Curtis and the Stantec team (formerly Cardno Engineering). When our collaboration started, James and his team in New Zealand had been consulting with Wellington Water on an overall pump modernization to deliver preventative asset maintenance of its pump stations. The Innovyze team had also just began its journey to delivering cloud SaaS solutions for water operational analytics with Info360 Insight.
Stantec and Innovyze worked together on a pilot program using Info360 Insight for continuous monitoring of Wellington Water’s pump performance, water network balance, and water infrastructure leakage index using SCADA data readings over time. Within the pilot, Stantec detected significant drops in pump efficiency using Info360 Insight’s pump performance analysis and user-built analytics tools.
Equipped with this data, Stantec was able to recommend improvements to Wellington Water’s pump operation and sequencing by running the most efficient combination of pumps at the appropriate speeds – identifying up to 8% in energy cost savings, 20% in electricity, that would enable the extension of pump life.
Digital pump monitoring and preventative maintenance
One of Wellington Water’s main interests in using Info360 Insight was based on the appealing idea that all calculations could be done in the software using SCADA data directly – avoiding the use of Excel spreadsheets. The software integrates with existing SCADA systems and receives data inputs already being collected from existing SCADA sensors, providing the capacity to upload thousands of sensors for analysis. Because of that, their antiquated Excel spreadsheets and macros, which were quite labor intensive and prone to ‘crashing’ from overloading, could be eliminated, freeing up time to spend on analysing the data.
Continuous monitoring of pump performance with Info360 Insight using SCADA data was determined to provide enough information to plan pump refurbishment and pump station upgrades.
The Info360 Insight pilot project with Stantec and Wellington Water serves as an important proof of concept for the outcomes that can be achieved when applying operational analytics to historical and live network data.
“If all councils ran their pumps more efficiently, the world could save significant amounts of energy consumption, money, and greenhouse gas emissions.”
As James and his team told me: if all councils ran their pumps more efficiently, the world could save significant amounts of energy consumption, money, and greenhouse gas emissions. We think that’s a goal worth pursuing – so take some time to optimise your pumps. It will save you – and the wider world – some energy.
Read more about the project and the capabilities of Info360 Insight in the full case study. If you are a power user of our software and would you like to be interviewed for a case study tag us on LinkedIn and let us know how you’re solving today’s water challenges with digital technologies.
Pilot program published in Water New Zealand: Digital Pump Monitoring: Striving for Preventative Maintenance, JA Curtis, Cardno Petone Office & H Lewis