The Town of Olds is hoping to earn itself an accolade at the 2012 Sustainable Community Awards for its innovative sonic leak detection system, which has now been at work for over a year and a half.
“We won't hear back until early October, but we'll have to see how it fares alongside other communities' submissions,” said Larry Wright, the town's director of operations.
The Sustainable Communities Awards is an annual recognition initiative by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) that offers acknowledgement to municipalities for excellence in environmental responsibility.
Awards are granted for projects in nine categories, including energy, planning, transportation, waste, and water, to name a few.
Wright said the town has “had good success” in winning FCM awards in recent years with its submissions, and he said he's not sure if that success will act for or against the town's favour in this year's competition.
“Olds is the only community in Canada right now that's employing this technology,” said Wright.
The system is a combination of hardware and software – small audio devices (about two to three inches in diameter) were attached to the copper water lines downstream of residential water meters, with one for roughly every two and a half homes throughout Olds, Wright said.
These little acoustic monitors carry out the task of monitoring ambient noises in the water system when the background noises of traffic are at their lowest levels (between midnight and 2 a.m.).
“It can detect if there is an anomaly in water movement,” said Wright.
This information is then sent to a computer database that compiles and organizes the information on a map that corresponds with the Town of Olds.
Through a process of elimination, the system finds trends in ambient noise during this portion of the evening, and if any noises break the trend, or seem out of place, they are flagged by the system so that they can be investigated.
When the system was first put into service about 18 months ago, it initially discovered 40 areas of concern, which were investigated and narrowed down to 11 leaks that needed repairing, said Wright.
These 11 instances were further investigated, excavated, and repaired, he said.
Wright estimates that they have reduced water loss in Olds by roughly 25,000 cubic metres of water a month since the sonic leak detection system was initiated.
“If you look at that at $1 or $2 per cubic metre, it starts to add up.”
In the past, Wright said there was a discrepancy between water purchased from the Mountain View Regional Water Services Commission and what was billed for and could be accounted for.
“We were seeing differences in excess of $400,000 per year. That's water going into the ground through leaks,” said Wright.
He notes that some of the leaks had also worn their way into the sanitary systems, meaning that water that had been paid for once was leaking (unused) into the sanitary system, and getting charged again to be pumped and treated as sewage.
“It was a double hit,” said Wright. “When you start to add it all up, it gets to be a pretty fascinating picture.”
–With Files from Paul Frey
