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>>Alexi Beck Gray: Most of us take for granted that when we turn on a faucet, fresh and safe drinking
water will come out. But where does that water come from? And how does it get to our taps?
And when it goes down the drain, where does it go?
Hi, Alexi here from Opto 22. I'm here today in Waterford, Michigan, to get some answers
to these questions. The Waterford Township Department of Public Works has invited us
here to show us how they treat and transport water to its over 74,000 residents.
It's a highly automated system with advanced monitoring capabilities. In fact, it's got more technology
than I've ever seen in a water and sewer district. So let's go take a look.
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I am sitting here with Terry Biederman from Waterford Township's Department of Public Works.
Terry, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
>>Terry: Well, I'm the director of Public Works for Waterford Township. It's a community
that's about 35 miles northwest of Detroit. It's in Oakland County and we're responsible
for 11 water treatment plants and we produce our own water. It comes from ground water
and we treat it and pump it into the distribution system where we have elevated tanks. Sewer-wise,
we've got 62 sewer pumping stations, 350 miles of sewer main, and 360 miles or so of water main.
>>Alexi: Very cool. You've got quite an elaborate alarming system. How many alarms
do you have and what happens with those alarms?
>>Terry: We alarm on over 1200 different events because none of our facilities, water or
wastewater facilities, are manned 24 hours a day. For example, we've got a program
in our control scheme using, you know, Opto 22. Basically, when an operator walks into a plant,
a dialog box will pop up on a screen and they've got to enter their password within 60 seconds.
If they don't enter a password within 60 seconds and that water plant is running,
the program will shut that plant down. We actually de-energize the motor control center and then
our people will get e-mail notifications telling us that we've got an unacknowledged intrusion
and that the pumps have been locked out so that they can respond accordingly.
All of our facilities have got ingress/egress monitoring and it's all done through the Opto
equipment as well. If the door opens, our people, you know, it'll get beamed back through the radio system,
which then gets into the SCADA system and the alarming package. It tells us what
facility it is and what type of ingress/egress it is, whether it is an internal motion detector
that got tripped, or whether it was a door alarm. So we know at all times who's coming
and going in the various facilities. We are currently using Opto 22 for everything in
control and automation. When I came here as a director in 1996, I wrote specifications
for a whole new SCADA system and it was centered around the Opto application.
>>Alexi: Wow, it's amazing! I understand you get calls from all over North America
from other municipalities interested in what you're doing here in Waterford. What is it about
your water and sewer systems that make it so unique?
>>Terry: Basically, I think where people see us a little differently than most other places
is the way everything is integrated together. It's not one application. It's not SCADA's
over here by itself, you know, or computer maintenance management's over here by itself, or document
management's over here by itself. Everything is integrated within one application. Our
GIS application integrates document management, water modeling, sewer modeling. They never
have to leave that environment. They can go in, they can create work orders in that environment,
they can search on work orders in that environment, they can bring up customer files in that environment.
So we can respond very quickly to our customers' needs and we can give them accurate information
a lot quicker than other communities can. We've also incorporated a broadband wireless
network, which means our people basically are mobile and they've got the same bandwidth
that they would literally have sitting at the desk in their office in the field.
>>Alexi: You also do things like monitoring pumps, how often they're turning on. Why do you do that?
>>Terry: Well, we monitor pumps on both water and wastewater. We monitor obviously if
the pumps are running, power failures, station flooding conditions, communication
failures, and all kinds of things. But more on the wastewater side, our sewer lift stations,
because what we're doing is, every day, we reset them all at midnight. And what we're
looking for is to make sure the pumps are alternating the way they're supposed to.
And we look at the runtimes to make sure that the runtimes for each one are consistent
with each other. For instance, if we've got a station that's got one pump that is double the runtime as the other
pump, we know that we've got a pump there that's probably either ragged up, or needs some type of maintenance put on it,
or really it could have a bad impeller, or whatever. Once again, it's proactive for us to go and take
care of that, as opposed to reactive. You know you've got a pump that is running
twice as long as the other one, well, that's a waste of energy.
>>Alexi: You've seen energy savings from that as well?
>>Terry: Absolutely, we've actually seen, probably pretty substantial energy savings.
Keeping in mind that our system has grown from where in 1996, we could only produce
14 million gallons of water a day, today we are producing almost 30 million gallons of
water a day. And then of course, the energy costs have increased, probably doubled since
then. So for it to only go up $60,000 USD over 12 years with that kind of an increase,
and that's due to everything from control systems, to monitoring, to putting in variable
frequency drives, you know a lot of energy management stuff. It's also saved us a tremendous
amount of overtime because the system is really automated. What we are really doing is programming
in a lot of our institutional knowledge, into the processes of these facilities so that
the programs themselves take care of a lot of these things.
>>Alexi: Even though you're not a programmer, you like to play around with the software.
What do you like about it?
>>Terry: I love the flowchart programming. I mean, that's the way I learned to program as an
engineer, and it's very basic as opposed to say, ladder logic, which by the way,
I can't believe anybody uses anymore [Alexi laughs]. But you know, you can make it as
complicated as you want, but at its core, it's very basic. You know, you ask a question:
Is a wet-well level greater than or equal to this level? And there are only two things can happen:
it's either yes or no. Yes, you're going to do this, no you're going to do that. And then
you just kind of cascade that through it. It's the way I think, basically.
>>Alexi: So what were some of the key features that made Opto 22 such a good fit for your
application and your needs?
>>Terry: Well, it's PC-based, the cost is less, it's more open architecture than really
most other applications that I've played with. I've used Motorola systems, I've
use Square D systems, I've used Fisher Bailey systems, I've used Allen-Bradley systems,
and I really like Opto's flexibility. I like their backward-compatible philosophy.
I've got stuff that's been there 12 years. They all talk, they all work, they're very
reliable and so yes, my overall satisfaction is that I am very happy with it.
>>Alexi: Right. Thanks for talking with us Terry. And thank you for watching the video.
For more information about this application, visit opto22.com. See you next time.
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