Water companies around the country have a major task ahead in order to be compliant with the Private Drains and Sewers (PDaS) requirements, which come into effect in October 2016. With thousands of properties falling under the new remit, finding suitable telemetry devices, compliant with the Water Industry Telemetry Standard (WITS) is now an increasing priority.

From October 2016 OFWAT has ruled that water companies will become responsible for most private sewers, lateral drains and pumping […]

About the author

Charles Williams – Strategic Business Director, Grontmij
MIET CEng BSc Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Charles has over 25 years experience in telemetry, SCADA, instrumentation, control and automation in the water, transportation and nuclear industries. He has supported the WITS initiative since its inception and is currently the Chairman of the WITS DNP 3 Protocol Standards Association committee.

The need for a standard protocol

All UK water companies use telemetry and SCADA to monitor and control their remote […]

Some of our members gave presentations at the IET Water Event last May. Please click on the links to view the presentations and video.

WITS PSA, ABB and Thames Water Combined Presentation

• Water Industry Telemetry Standards – Charles Williams, Grontmij
• An explanation of WITS – Ray Keech, ABB
• An integrated flow and pressure metering solution with GPRS WITS protocol – Ray Keech, ABB
• Implementation of the WITS based SCADA within Thames Water – Russell Wheadon, Thames […]
  

At Northern Ireland Water, Telemetry provides monitoring (and in some cases control) of approximately 4,500 clean and wastewater assets. Telemetry not only provides alarm annunciation, local monitoring and control but also provides regulatory and operational data. There is a reliance on accurate and timely data being provided for business, operational purposes and for the security of customer water and wastewater facilities. At each asset signals are marshalled into a local Telemetry outstation e.g. pump status, […]

We welcome new member Cuculus GmbH of Ilmenau, Germany.

Cuculus operate in the fields of smart metering and energy management and were shortlisted for the Innovation of the Year Award 2015.

The PSA contact is Gunnar Scharfe – co-founder and CFO/COO – who is responsible for Technology Development, Operations and Finance.

See their website at http://www.cuculus.net/en.

The reliable provision of water and sewerage services requires water companies to think and plan long term, especially when it comes to effective asset care. Water companies are under unprecedented pressure to reduce maintenance costs, but are they harnessing the power of systems and technology already in their possession to aid this, or merely reacting to problems as they occur? Guy Fitzpatrick from Xylem explains why it’s time to change maintenance methodology from cure to […]

A breakthrough in developing WITS certified Field Devices

The Committee recognises that, to date, developing and testing a WITS Field Device for self-certification has sometimes proved difficult and costly due to the lack of suitable Master Station test software.

We are delighted to announce that two of our Master Station vendors – Servelec Systems and Schneider Electric – now offer development / test Master Station licences to WITS third party Field Device manufacturers.

Using a verified Master Station […]

ABB’s AquaMaster 3 Flow Meter was already WITS Self Certified since June this year. Now ABB have gone one step further and, in conjunction with Schneider Electric and Servelec, have achieved full verification.

The defined verification procedure was followed – see “How to achieve self certified and verified status” for further details.

The device now appears in the Verified Field Devices section of the Device Catalogue.