Reducing leakage in aging water infrastructure

Across the world, our towns and cities rely on aging water infrastructure. Alongside this, urban populations are growing, placing increasing demands on existing distribution networks. Reducing the volume of water lost through leakage provides immediate efficiency gains.

Dramatically reducing leakage

Early and reliable identification of leaks is therefore needed for this approach to be effective. When ABB’s world-leading flowmeters were installed in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, leakage was cut by nearly 40 percent.

Aging water infrastructure

Cities are at the heart of today’s society. Migration towards urban environments continues unabated and the number of megacities with their mega populations is on the rise. Existing water distribution networks were built for a different era yet the need to provide water as efficiently as possible to these growing populations is a priority.

Minimizing leakage in existing networks is a key part of this, especially where renewing piping on a large scale isn’t feasible. The sprawling city of Riyadh stretches over 200 square miles and its 6,000 miles of piping was losing about 60 percent of all water transported. Any solution had to be easy to install, reliable and maintenance-free to ensure long-term productivity gains were assured.

Reducing leakage

Large-scale projects to modernize aging water distribution networks demand exceptionally robust solutions. ABB’s FlowMaster provides outstanding accuracy and performance, monitoring how much water is flowing, and detecting when and where leaks occur throughout a piping network to reduce wastage.

Even in Riyadh’s harsh climate, ABB’s robust WaterMaster and AquaMaster flowmeters could deliver, and their maintenance free operating life and battery-powered options meant even the most remote locations could be reliably monitored. Installing ABB’s flowmeters has seen water leakage reduce by about 40 percent across Riyadh.

The strong, durable design of ABB’s flowmeters ensures a long, maintenance-free operating life, even in the most difficult conditions.

Cityscape

Find out how ABB’s world-leading flowmeters reduce water leakage.

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