In an attempt to bring down the City’s unaccounted for water, The City of DuBois came up with a plan: implement a proactive approach to finding leaks. Exeter Supply Inc. and Gutermann Inc. teamed up with the city to offer solutions. Together, they decided to deploy Gutermann Zonescan Loggers at predetermined locations throughout the city's water system.
Soon after, in December of 2020, Exeter Supply, with the help of Gutermann's Eric Galosi, deployed 187 Zonescan Loggers on gate valves along the city’s water lines. These correlating loggers are designed to pinpoint leak locations between any two deployed loggers. Once activated, the loggers immediately began identifying leaks in the city:
Pictured above is Gutermann’ s “Gutermann Cloud” or Zonescan.net; a highly secure and sophisticated cloud server stores logger and correlation data. The user can can log in from any device to view data, upload GIS pipe files, identify maintenance needs, and print correlation reports.
One year after the system was installed, the results toppled the utility's initial hopes. The ALPHA system recovered the city's investment within months, and continued to provide returns throughout the year.
In early 2022, Chris Nasuti, Engineer for the City of Dubois: included the following information in an email sent to the City of Dubois City Council:
"To: DuBois City Council
From: Chris Nasuti, City Engineer
Date: 1/14/2022
Re: 2021 System Water Loss
Total Number of Leaks 2021: 29
Main line leaks: 20
Service leaks: 9
Calculated System Water Loss 2020: 238,013,000 Gal. = 28.28%
Calculated System Water Loss 2021: 141,978,000 Gal. = 17.20%
Reduction in System Water Loss: 96,035,000 Gal. = 11.08%
Cost to treat and distribute to tanks: $4.05/1000 Gallons
Savings through reduction in System Loss: $388,941.75
Cost to purchase and install leak detection system: $250,000.00"
“As you can see, the loggers made a significant impact for us. This is the first time we have been under 20% system loss in the 10 years that I have been working for the city,”
- Chris Nasuti, City of Dubois Engineer.
“I am thrilled to have worked with Eric Galosi of Gutermann Inc., Brian Decker of Exeter Supply Inc., and The City of DuBois team on this project. It is very gratifying to see the results in just one year.”
- Brendan Line, Product Specialist Exeter Supply Inc.
“These results show the benefit of the fully automatic, systemwide, daily pinpoint correlation function of the Gutermann Zonescan leak detection system.”
– Eric Galosi of Gutermann Inc.
Well done to The City of DuBois! Keep up the great work with managing your water loss.
