At AWWA ACE18, Dave Rubin, director of product management, and Josh Chaise, vice president of product management for water and gas, sat down with Alanna Maya from WaterWorld Magazine to talk about issues related to non-revenue water as well as ways, including using acoustic leak detection, to manage and repair leaks. What follows are highlights from the interview, but you can listen to it in entirety here.

(Questions and answers are edited for space.)

Alanna Maya: Josh, could you start off by listing some of the problems with non-revenue water, in terms of water utilities and finding leaks.

Josh Chaise: Aclara’s been involved in helping water utilities for close to two decades, and within AMI communications, we’re able to really help utilities identify leaks and optimize their networks. Much of that focus has been behind the meter.

In fact, we commissioned a study this year that identified water utilities spend about five billion dollars a year on treating water that’s ultimately lost before it’s ever delivered to the end customer. So, we’re really excited about ways to expand beyond AMI to help utilities recover those dollars.

Alanna Maya: Dave, can you talk about some of the announcements that you’re making at the show, in terms of basically managing that non-revenue water.

Dave Rubin: At the show, we’re announcing our ZoneScan Gen II product. (The Aclara leak detection solutions leverages the AMI network to identify underground leaks to within a few feet. Read the release.)

We’ve had ZoneScan out for about six years, in the market using the Aclara AMI RF network, and it’s been quite successful and got a lot of great response. We’ve circled back and improved it and enhanced it in quite a few ways. Much more reliable communications, longer battery life, more data; we think it’s going to be a strong step forward for network distribution leak detection.

Alanna Maya: What does the future look like, in terms of advancements, for sensing and distribution networks.

Dave Rubin: One example is pressure monitoring. One of the things people are doing to mitigate their leaks is lowering the pressure across their system which is hard to do if you don’t have good insight into what the current pressure the system’s running at. So if we put pressure sensors across the network, again, coming back through our network in real time, so you see very accurate, very up to date data.

To learn more, listen to the whole interview here.

Listen to the full interview