A German town with currently 33% water loss buys ZONESCAN ALPHA to help reduce NRW and save valuable financial resources in the future; GUTERMANN wins against German competition
Aulendorf in Baden-Württemberg, 15 June 2015: The local town council holds a public meeting to discuss several agenda points. Amongst others: The approval of a significant investment into an effective water leak detection monitoring system. The recommendation of the specialist committee: Buy 150 measurement ZONESCAN ALPHA as the most effective and suitable technology to fight the very high leakage rates.
Aulendorf is well known in Germany having had to save costs significantly in recent years. In 2008, this town with 10,000 inhabitants had debts of EUR 64 million and had to be put under state administration. To this date any budgetary spend has to be approved by a state body, even though the debt has been reduced to around EUR 20 million. So it is even more surprising that Aulendorf would invest a significant amount of money into leak detection technology. The reason is a financial one: In 2014, Aulendorf sourced 474,000 m3 of water, but only sold 323,000 m3. The remaining ca. 150,000 (33% NRW) was lost through leaks, costing the town EUR 90,000 per annum.
Aulendorf invited 6 providers of leak detection technology (acoustic and flow methods) to bid for this project. Two got invited to set up a pilot of 10 measurement points. In the end, Aulendorf decided to buy GUTERMANN for two technical reasons:
• ZONESCAN ALPHA has the better radio connection: The ZONESCAN 820 loggers managed to send out their recorded data through the closed lids without any antenna extension while the competitor had to use extended antenna loggers for a decent radio reception
• The ZONESCAN system correlates automatically every night. This way, the operator can detect leaks that are too quiet for the simple noise logger. The competing system provides correlation data as well, but only upon manual triggering and based on leak noise suspicion.
Aulendorf will be another satisfied customer in GUTERMANN's ZONESCAN ALPHA customer base, which at this stage includes almost 100 towns and cities around the world.