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A better way to detect underground water leaks:
You can delay irrigating the lawn or washing the car all you want, but to really make a big dent in water savings we need to stop water waste long before the precious resource ever reaches our taps.
An estimated 20 to 50 percent of water is lost to leaks in North America's supply system -- a major issue as utilities contend with how to sustain a growing population in an era of water scarcity.
"People talk about reducing the time you take showers, but if you think about 50 percent of water flowing through the system being lost, it's another magnitude," said study author Daniel Tartakovsky, a professor of energy resources engineering in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).
In a move that could potentially save money and billions of gallons of water, Tartakovsky, along with Abdulrahman Alawadhi from the University of California, San Diego, have proposed a new way to swiftly and accurately interpret data from pressure sensors commonly used to detect leaks.
In addition to water utilities, Tartakovsky said the method could also be applied to other industries that use pressure sensors for leak detection, such as in oil and natural gas transmission networks that run under the sea and pose additional environmental hazards.
The research was published online Feb. 12 in the journal Water Resources Research.
Abdulrahman Alawadhi, Daniel M. Tartakovsky. Bayesian Update and Method of Distributions: Application to Leak Detection in Transmission Mains. Water Resources Research, 2020; DOI: 10.1029/2019WR025879
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday February 28 2020, @02:37PM (3 children)
A couple times a month someone runs over a fire hydrant sending a geyser of water 30 feet into the sky for a few hours until it gets turned off.
Are you telling me nobody has invented a hydrant that automatically shuts off the water when the head gets knocked off?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by dwilson on Friday February 28 2020, @05:27PM (1 child)
I can easily imagine a scenario where such a beast was invented, installed, silently failed at an unknown point in time, and then when the fire dept. showed up to tap that hydrant to put out a fire, it shut the water off on them. And that would have been the end of that.
- D
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday February 28 2020, @09:03PM
Around here the fire dept. annually goes to every hydrant, opens it, and lets it run for while just to make sure that they all work and the system doesn't become plugged with sediment
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Friday February 28 2020, @08:58PM
Around here, the shutoff valve for the hydrant is down in the watermain where it never freezes. The hydrant itself is completely dry. The bolt on top of the hydrant is a bit column that leads down to the valve at the bottom.
I never knew this was the case until I saw a car knock a hydrant off, and was disappointed not to see a big geyser.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh