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If you have live data and delimited zones in your network, Qatium will provide useful insights on water balance so that you can improve it.
You can easily evaluate if there’s an abnormally high amount of non-revenue water (NRW) in a specific DMA and what causes it, and take the right actions to amend the situation. This really comes in handy when managing pressures in your network.
Water balance insights
Hover over or click the zone and you’ll receive extra information about:
- Net flow: of water in your network (available values both from simulation data and inlet/outlet sensors readings, if any).
- Efficiency: percentage of water that gets to customers (only if there are inlet/outlet flow sensors and live demands for all the customer points).
- Estimated leakage: an estimation of non-revenue water in the zone (specific network requirements listed below).
Requirements for estimated leakage
For you to be able to see Estimated leakage data in your zones, your network needs to be modelled for leakage including:
- Zone inlets/outlets (minimum one zone with at least one inlet), defined according to the our guidelines.
- Live data for all zone inlets/outlets (at least for a 24h period with a resolution of at least 1hr). Alternatively, you could upload a INP network model with calibrated demands (i.e. EPS model with calibrated demand patterns for demand nodes).
- A measurement (or estimation) of the legitimate water consumption within each zone at the time of minimum night flow (MNF). This consumption value will be used to calculate a consumption factor for estimating leakage at the time of MNF. The higher the accuracy of this value, the higher the accuracy of the estimated leakage will be.
Once your network meets these requirements, contact us to enable the Estimated leakage feature for you.
Zones panel insights
In addition, with the Zones panel you can quickly locate the inlets and outlets in each sector. This will help you understand how the DMAs are supplied and notice if any value is outside the expected range. You’ll be able to promptly find out if there really is an anomaly consumption in the network, increase in NRW, among other things.
To activate it:
- Click on the Zones
icon
- Switch the toggle ON
The icon for inlets and outlets 
- Alone, if no readings are available.
- With a sensor icon in gray: when in the current time there are no readings available.
- With a sensor icon in blue: when there are readings for the current period.
If you click on a zone, you’ll also see some useful insights in the panel:
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Zone pressures, where you find:
- The number of customer points with low pressure: less than 20 m for international system networks and less than 30 psi for US customary networks.
- The number of junctions with high pressure: more than 60 m for international system networks and more than 90 psi for US customary networks.
- A list of the zone boundary valves, pretty useful when changing pressure zones boundaries.
- Inlets and outlets in each sector. This will help you understand how the DMAs are supplied and notice if any value is outside the expected range.
⚠️ Important:
- When there are no customer points uploaded in the network, we use junctions with demands to calculate the number of customer points and their pressures.
- If the Zones plugin is not available on your subscription, you can buy it from the Marketplace or upgrade your plan.
💡 Tip from Q:
- To have a clearer view of this information, you can activate the Overview.
- Need more help? Ask me and I’ll show you the network zones on the map, a list the inlets and outlets, and a quick overview of the zone’s insights.
FAQs & Troubleshooting
Why is my network not displaying water balance insights?
Why is my network not displaying water balance insights?
If you have delimited zones but you are not seeing any insights about water balance, it’s probably because your network is missing some data.
Check your network includes the following data.
| Network requirements | |
|---|---|
| Net flow | Inlet/outlet sensors readings (athough we'll also display net flow data from the simulation) |
| Efficiency |
|
| Estimated leakage |
|
How does Qatium calculate water balance insights?
How does Qatium calculate water balance insights?
The main insights we are displaying on water balance are:
- Net flow in your network, which we get from the flowmeters:
Net flow = inlets - outlets - Efficiency (the percentage of water that actually gets to customers):
Efficiency = (Consumption / Net flow)*100 - Estimated leakage is calculated from the simulation values of the pressure and junction emitters: Estimated leakage = (junction pressure ^ network emitter exponent) * junction emitter
We get the consumption from live demands.
Efficiency doesn’t appear on the water balance insights
Efficiency doesn’t appear on the water balance insights
There could be 2 reasons why you are not seeing efficiency data in your zones:
- There are no live demands for all the junctions classified as Customer points.
- You uploaded live demands but there are some errors in the consumption data.
We use the following formula to calculate efficiency: (Consumption / Net flow)*100. If during the calculations the efficiency results are above 100%, the data will be hidden.
We do this because a efficiency above 100% would mean that consumption is higher than the water injected in the zone, which couldn't be physically possible. Most of the times this is related with inaccuracies on the readings, so if you are experiencing this issue make sure to check your readings and try again with accurate data.
What happens if the water balance insights are N/A?
What happens if the water balance insights are N/A?
If the net flow, efficiency, or both, appears as N/A, probably there is data available but the insights are incoherent, or some flow-meter is missing.