Waipa district meter area design

Jivir Viyakesparan, Dorcas Adjei-Sasu, Haiming Li, and Pramodi Galabadage 

Waipa District Council (WDC) began its water demand management planning journey in 2010 when it prepared its first water conservation and demand management plan to serve as a road map for the future. This developed a better understanding of historical water demand and presented a high-level evaluation of each scheme's most relevant future water demand management measures. One of the WDC 2021 activity management plans is non-revenue water (NRW) reduction to reduce both real water losses (physical leakages) and apparent water losses (commercial losses), with a greater priority for reduction of real water losses by improving network assets management, active leakage control, speed and quality of leak repairs, and pressure management to increase water supply capacity.

In this project, the District Meter Area (DMA) network zoning approach, as a demand and leakage management initiative, is adapted to align with WDC strategic objectives and ensure a solution that will support current needs and adapt to future requirements. The paper introduces the DMA zoning approach, reviews the existing Waipa water supply network, outlines the development of the DMA concepts plans and the smart networks.

The hydraulic analysis was performed in the existing water supply network model for each DMA to verify each DMA's functionality in terms of the minimum level of service and the fire flow. The hydrants in each DMA ware tested for fire flow in terms of minimum residual pressure to supply the firefighting water (FW2) flow requirements.

Concept plans are developed to split the existing water supply zones into manageable DMAs. Waipa District's water supply system is divided into ten main areas based on district water balance areas used for the model build and calibration project. There are district zones already metred and provided a starting point for this project to refine and develop 20 new smaller DMAs. High-level cost estimation with an implementation plan was conducted as well.