Flow.Watch

Fire Supply Surveillance

Flow.Watch is a unique solution that combines advanced temperature analysis with our versatile telemetry technology to create an economical method to monitor fire supply flow.

Flow.Watch identifies and categorises fire supply flow into leakage, test use and intermittent use.  This enables water companies to identify the fire supplies from which water is being used or lost, helping to account for water consumption and determine whether apparent DMA night flow loss increases are because of customer use or customer-side losses.

Flow.Watch is a patented product as awarded by the IPO.

Case Study

Severn Trent approached Invenio systems in January 2019 to assess the extent of water use in the fire mains systems of some of their large industrial facilities. Accounting for this water may help discover leakages and deliver an on-going revenue benefit to Severn Trent.

Invenio’s new approach monitored 118 industrial fire supplies over 8 weeks. Of these sites, 36 were found to have regular water usage events drawing from the unmetered fire supply (30.5%). In addition, 35 were found to have some form of leakage (30%) and testing was recorded in 16 sites (14%).

Flow testing in the fire supply of one property discovered usage of 375 litres/minute. With weekly tests on average lasting 38 minutes, Invenio estimated up to 229,800 litres/week of usage from fire
supply testing alone.

As a permanent network deployment, Flow.Watch has the potential to continually monitor fire supplies and unmetered connections. With data transmitted via low cost cellular telemetry, the requirement for expensive site visits and ‘drive-by’ data collection is removed.

Key Features and Benefits

• Reliable flow detection: capable of detecting almost any flow through the fire supply

• Unaccounted for water: improved the water balance

• Supports revenue increase: customer use in unmetered fire supply identified

• Enhanced customer service: enables rapid resolution of customer-side losses on unmetered services

• Fixed network monitoring: continual analysis of flow and/or leaks

• Versatile application: suitable for public supply fire hydrants and private fire supply systems 

• Customer protection: detecting fire supply back-siphonage before water quality affected

• Cost-effective: cheaper, non-restrictive alternative to metering

• Easy installation: simple, cable tied attachment and remote set up via GPRS

• Flow categorisation: detected flow can be categorised into leakage, illegal use or fire tests

• Telemetry: integral SMS/GPRS/4G/NBIoT/LTE-M (Cat-1) cellular options

• Remote viewing: viewing via server hosted software