Avoid Death by a Thousand Cuts: Quantifying and Reducing Background Leakage Using InfoWater Pro

Huge volumes of drinking water are lost to background leakage during distribution. This entails large financial and environmental footprints from extraction, transport, treatment, storage, and pumping. While water models usually simplify leakage to behave as fixed demands, InfoWater Pro software’s new modeling capabilities explicitly incorporate the sensitivity of losses to pressure changes. In this session, we will demonstrate how to easily convert a regular distribution model into one with realistic leakage using a new allocation tool. Both hydraulic and asset pipe information (such as age, number of connections, and material) is used to determine realistic allocations of known leakage amounts per zone to individual elements. Moreover, we will explore how a leakage-aware model can lead to detailed spatiotemporal estimates of water loss under different operating scenarios, and lead to precise quantifications of the economic and hydraulic effects of asset replacement and pressure-control programs.