Accounting for Losses: The Bursts and Background Concept

Abstract

Losses of treated water occur through leakage and overflows from the pressurized pipes and fittings in water undertakers’distribution systems and customers’private supply pipes. The UK National Leakage Control Initiative was formed in 1991 to update previous published work on leakage control policy and practice in the UK. Although some published technical relationships exist, there has been no overall methodology which attempts to provide a component‐based estimate of annual losses in different parts of the distribution system for any particular combination of local circumstances, i.e. pressure, burst frequency, burst flow rate, number of properties, length of mains, method of leakage control, standards of service, and waste notice service/enforcement policy. The ‘bursts and background estimate’spreadsheet‐based methodology is designed to provide such estimates. It links ‘night‐flow’and ‘annual losses’concepts, and can be used for a variety of purposes. These include (a) assessment of the likely incidence of losses for different leakage control and waste notice policies, (b) identification (from night flows) of districts in which there are unreported bursts, and (c) assessment of economic target levels for leakage control. The substantial element of annual losses from service pipes, and the considerable influence of pressure on annual losses, are also discussed.

Methodology to Detect and Isolate Water Losses in Water Hydraulic Networks: Application to Barcelona Water Network

“…The mean minimum night flow is the arithmetic mean value of the measured in a short period of time (i.e. from 0h to 4h am everyday) during all the days of the studied month and the night reference flow (l/s) can be computed as proposed by Lambert (1994) Figure 1 gives useful information to the responsible of the network operation for each sector or DMA of the water distribution network. It helps in the maintenance planning to minimise water loss in the network and to locate the non visible leakages in those DMA that appear prone to have leakages.…”

“…Lambert (1994) proposed to combine the annual balance of water networks of German Water Companies with the study of night water consumption used by Britannic Water Companies to estimate which sectors of the network are more liable to suffer real water losses or apparent losses due to metering underestimation errors. The standard balance of water from IWA (Lambert, 1994) is very useful for this task. The concept of Non-Revenue Water (NRW) includes (Table 1) all measured or non-authorized consumptions of water and the water losses.…”

Decision model to control water losses in distribution networks

“…Instead, a significant portion of it is lost, due to leakage from water mains and unauthorized water use (Wu et al, 2010). The loss of treated water occurs by leakages and overflows from the pressurized pipes and fittings in water undertaker distribution systems and customers' private supply pipes (Lambert, 1994). Increasingly, water loss via leakage is acknowledged as one of the primary challenges facing water distribution system operations.…”

Technical performance indicators in water supply system and development of technical measures for performance improvement in small water supply system in Serbia

“…Koncept BABE [69] se može koristiti za sračunavanje, po prvobitnoj postavci, do 18 komponeneti gubitaka u različitim delovima distributivnog sistema i na delu mreže koja pripada korisniku. Smatra se da se sistem sastoji od:…”

“…Ova oštećenja ostaju nezapažena sve dok se ne sprovede neka akcija na njihovom otkrivanju. Skriveni gubici, u BABE analizi [69], sastoje se od dva elementa: neotkrivena procurivanja i gubitaka nerazjašnjenog uzroka.…”