Wastewater maintenance contractors are abstracting mains water required for sewer and drainage system cleaning tasks tens of thousands of times per day across the whole of the UK, and some of it is being done illegally.

Abstraction licences are agreed locally with water companies, but problems occur when the incorrect hydrants and wash out points are utilised because accurate maps of approved ones have not been provided. When the wrong ones are used, especially ones owned by a neighbouring water provider, wastewater companies can face very heavy fines.

Drainage solution provider Lanes Utilities has been working on an app for the past year that can accurately pinpoint 130,000 abstraction points across the Thames Water region and fundamental neighbouring areas. This will provide a platform for water utilities to monitor and charge for abstraction in real time, and it is also hoped that the app will greatly reduce the risk of illegal water abstraction, and improve leak detection.

The app took a long time to develop due to the fact that, when Lanes Utilities started working with utility Thames Water colleagues to obtain data about hydrant and wash out assets in early 2016, they were immediately challenged because the information was not stored in an easily accessible manner.

This meant that they had to physically check the location and status of each abstraction asset and assess whether it could be reached by a jet vac tanker or a van pack unit. This entailed accessing each hydrant’s GPS coordinates via thousands of photos uploaded to FieldViewer by Lanes wastewater engineers when they abstracted water; a system of colour-coding also revealed which water company owned the hydrant.

All of this information was then collated on a spreadsheet and loaded into a trial version of the app, so they could test it in the field until the app’s full functionality was developed. Lanes Utilities is now rolling out the water abstraction app on its FieldViewer digital operational platform.

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