.png)
In 2021, the Berkeley County Public Service Sewer District in West Virginia was fined $518,400 in penalties for, among other things, exceeding pollution limits and allowing sanitary sewer overflows.
King County, home to Seattle, faced $105,500 in fines in 2019 for violating sewer overflow standards. This is in addition to the $361,000 in penalties they faced after stormwater mixed with wastewater in Puget Sound. It was an equipment failure that caused this infraction…something that could happen to any wastewater treatment plant.
Why an IoT-Based Remote Wastewater Surveillance System is Worth It
If you're reading this article, there's a good chance you know just how high EPA fines can get when things go wrong with your wastewater treatment plant, especially when you don’t catch it quick enough.
The EPA fines companies and wastewater treatment plants $2,500 to $25,000 a day for allowing pollutants to enter waters in the United States. If violations continue, that penalty goes up to $50,000 a day. The longer a spill or overflow goes on, the higher that fine reaches.
As operations folks know, there are a whole host of reasons why things go wrong with wastewater treatment equipment. While it’s crucial to prevent those problems whenever possible, it’s smart to have a Plan B.
Imagine your bathroom for a second. It might be in the corner behind the toilet or in a closet, but there is a plunger somewhere. It's a no-brainer. You don't want to use it, but you will always have it there, just in case. The alternative is…messy.
What happens if an aeration pump fails? If one of your tanks reaches its limit? You can catch issues like that before they become a monstrous headache and an even more monstrous pollution fee. Because the alternative of not having that safety net is…even messier.
How Wastewater Surveillance Pays for Themselves. Fast.
As anyone who's ever had a root canal knows, it's cheaper (and less painful) to catch problems early than it is to fix them when they're too far gone. Condition-based alarms and alerts notify you as soon as your plant needs attention and maintenance before things get out of control.
No matter the size of your wastewater treatment plant, this easily-scalable system boosts your team’s control of and responsiveness to your plant’s operations…no matter where they are. If you go a step further with remote monitoring and management solutions, You’ll be able to catch problems and even shut them down from anywhere, minimizing the need to be onsite.
Between not receiving EPA fines and preventing wastewater plant downtime, you’ll notice the cost savings.
Here’s what our clients who’ve implemented remote monitoring survelliance enjoy:
Stay in compliance with regulatory organizations and avoid environmental contamination
Real-time, remote plant performance monitoring and preventive maintenance
Minimized repair costs and maximized equipment efficiency
No unnecessary downtime or outage
Decision-making based on actionable data and trend analysis
Intuitive, easily customizable, and ready-to-go dashboards and KPIs
A cloud historian with storage of all sensor readings & performance data
What IoT Has to Do With Wastewater Monitoring
You can’t control what you're not watching. Traditionally, this means a lot of onsite human presence and manual monitoring to avoid wastewater treatment process problems.
However, due to advancements in IoT (internet of things) technologies, you can surveillance any part of your plant from anywhere. Your operations team doesn’t need to be onsite in order to know what is going on. Data from each sensor is constantly being analyzed by software, cutting out the potential error of manual observation and evaluation.
Let’s review the processes involved in industrial IoT
All IoT systems involve connecting "things", sending and receiving data between the "things" and the data center by means of an IoT gateway, analysis of the data, and actions triggered by that analysis.
While the "cutting-edge technology" name for this is IoT, for most in the field, this is just a remote monitoring system.
Industrial IoT projects often get a bad rap for being complicated and expensive. That's where the advancements in IoT come into play. Now, more than ever, industrial IoT projects are easier, quicker, and more cost-effective to implement. We can thank "out-of-the-box" solutions and pros that are more and more experienced each year for that. As a result, IIoT solutions can be put together using tech that's already been made. Even custom solutions are easier this way.
What an IoT / remote monitoring surveillance would look like for a wastewater treatment plant
Step One: Data
We hook up IoT sensors to the equipment you need to monitor. You can keep track of flow, current on aeration pumps, backup power, overflow tank volume, and any other performance indicators you need.
Step Two: Communication
Your sensors are constantly sending data wirelessly to the cloud. Most of this data will be regular performance, useful for evaluating when preventive maintenance is pertinent and making business decisions.
Step Three: Integration
Using our own Moonshot IoT, a ready-to-go industrial IoT platform, we’re able to easily integrate into your asset management systems, such as IBM’s Maximo. As IT and operations folks know, system integration is historically one of the biggest challenges when talking about IoT projects.
Step Four: Dashboard
Out of the box, our platform comes with a set of predefined dashboards and KPI templates. We can customize and teach your team to customize these templates to reflect your plant’s performance perfectly.
Step Five: Condition-Based Alerts
If flow, volume, pressure, or power levels reach critical indicators based on predetermined KPIs, alerts will be sent automatically via text message or email before small issues become emergencies.
It Always Pays to Have a Plan B
If your teeth have a good dentist… And your bathroom has a plunger… Then your wastewater treatment plant should implement remote surveillance of its processes and enable early alerts on events that are happening, just in time.
Because the difference between just in time and too late might be hundreds of thousands of dollars.