Chicago water utility, Illinois

Engineers

leaks found

days to payback

The challenge

A water utility located in northern Chicago was finding that high water production costs and lack of a dedicated leak resource meant leakage was hitting its bottom line.

Although its leakage rates were fairly typical for an older network of largely cast-iron pipelines, the utility only had two distribution technicians available to carry out reactive investigations using correlators and ground microphones. Leak control was made even more challenging by a relative lack of assets for fixed network monitors and a lack of district metering.

The utility wanted to trial the use of FIDO AI technology to both detect and locate non-surfacing leaks in an area of suspected high water loss.

The solution

The utility’s two engineers were equipped with Leak Locate powered by FIDO AI, an AI-enabled solution encompassing versatile low-cost mini sensors and an intuitive smartphone app. The app communicates with the sensors and FIDO AI in the cloud.

After minimal training, the technicians deployed the small magnetic sensors as overnight loggers on distribution network valves, hydrant isolation valves and customer meter pits.

After data collection the next day, FIDO AI instantly returned leak results, ranked by size, into the app and portal dashboard.

The results

By using sensors as mobile loggers over a wide area, in the first two months of use the team proactively identified and located 19 non-visible leaks which would otherwise not have been found.

The estimated saving in water production costs from these initial leaks alone more than covered the cost of the Leak Locate equipment.