Nelson City Council - a case study
Nelson

Nelson City Council - a case study

“I can see a great use for Plexus throughout New Zealand”

Nelson City Council Inflow and Infiltration Engineer, Bill Ewing had identified a number of issues in his wastewater infrastructure.

Salt water was getting into the ne​twork and, from time to time, heavy rainfall during storms was causing pumps stations and treatment plants to struggle. For Nelson’s residents, the flow-on effects could be less than desirable. Needless to say, Bill was keen to accurately pinpoint the causes, their locations and develop sustainable, resilient solutions:

By understanding the differences between rainfall and tidal impacts, Bill says, he can prioritise repairs and capital spending. Historically, Bill admitted, the process of analysing pump station SCADA data was “a bit of a painful process”, often involving making assumptions and “just hoping you get it right”.

T+T’s Plexus helps us understand which parts of our network are the real ‘problem children’. You’re then trying to direct your mains replacement programmes and repairs to reduce the effects. My aim is to try and measure the improvements we make – so if we replace a main or do some work on a catchment, we can actually say how much improvement we’ve had.

We’ll get some idea of what value for money we get from doing repairs. We can also identify exactly which catchments we should be concentrating on, because we can see the ones that are giving us the worst inflows.

We’ve already been getting some very nice results of tidal inflows as well. It’s all heading in a good direction and it’s helping me to understand where we should be focusing our expenditure.

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