Upgrade Recoups Lost Money For Water Utility

Located within New Jersey’s Passaic County, the Borough of Ringwood’s water utility needed upgrades to its outlying area—the Upper Ringwood Service Area. H2M was retained to provide reliable, quality water supply without excessive levels of unaccounted water loss. Long-term solutions for reliable water service were found by identifying the most critical water infrastructure features in need of resolutions.

Prior to the project, pressure regulation and disinfectant application was labor-intensive, requiring water treatment operators to visit the chemical feed system, which was located in a confined space, twice daily, every day to adjust dosage. Another issue due to the manual operation of the tank, was its frequent overfilling, wasting nearly 1 million gallons of water per week. H2M incorporated a SCADA system into a Chemical Safety Panel to improve operations and system performance. Upon system startup, the SCADA flow control immediately stopped the tank from overtopping when excess water was introduced into the system. A large leak in the system was also discovered by the system, which led to recovering 100,000 gallons of unaccounted water per day. Solar panels were also designed to provide power to the instruments and radios.

The project demonstrates that even small systems can deploy SCADA technology effectively, and at reasonable cost. Overall, the project saves the client approximately $106,000 per year in wasted water, leading to capital recovery in less than five years.