Desalination & Reuse Handbook - Flipbook - Page 88
IDA
WATER SECURITY
HANDBOOK
QASSIM, SAUDI ARABIA: ADVANCED METERING INFRASTRUCTURE
Saudi Arabia is in the process of executing one of the world’s largest
metering programmes – as of August 2018, 900,000 smart water
meters had been installed out of a planned 2.1 million by 2021. This
total is spread across the country, and is made up of a large number
of municipal and regional projects to increase meter coverage.
The Kingdom represents a challenging environment for traditional
mechanical water meters: the moving parts of the meters struggle
with sand in pipelines, resulting in readings that underestimate
total flow rates. Sand deposits can dirty or block mechanical meters,
at the cost of measurement accuracy – as a result actual water
consumption is often higher than recorded.
The Al-Qassim region is no exception, Qassim’s pipeline system
was showing strong signs of wear and tear. As a result, the General
Directorate of Water Qassim (GDOW) was aware of high rates of
NRW, but had very little data available to facilitate effective network
improvements, and was devoting significant resources to manual
reading of unreliable meters.
Diehl metering carried out the advanced metering infrastructure
(AMI) project along with a local partner, Abunayyan Trading. This
involved the installation of 38,500 ultrasonic smart water meters
and 22 permanent receivers, removing the need for manual meter
reading. Meter data is transmitted from the receivers to a central
server every two hours, and is automatically imported into the
IZAR@NET 2 meter data management software. The software
includes functions to display data in aggregate and geographically,
and can be set to automatically email a technician when inferred
losses in the network rise unexpectedly.
Leaks within a building can be detected using predefined events,
such as an interrupted 24-hour flow without at least 15 minutes of
stoppage. Leaks in the network can be inferred from discrepancies
between water volumes entering and exiting the network, meaning
that a greater density of meters will result in more accurate leak
detection.
RDC Premium Receiver
Hydrus Water Meters
with Radio Transmitters
Source: Diehl
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The project provided immediate benefits to DEWA allowing automatic
billing of the customers as well as early identification of supply and
billing issues. Diehl Metering delivers a performance of above 96%
on quarter of an hour readings and over 99% on hourly readings.
at DEWA, where they are processed and the data is decrypted
for the first time.
In addition to the collection of meter readings and central monitor-
