Alderwood Water runs a highly advanced wastewater treatment plant membrane process on iFIX – including everything from screenings, to wastewater and managing the micro organisms that break down the waste, waste water processing and treatment for disposal, wastewater collections through lift stations and pumpstations. They also have drinking water pump stations to move large quantities of potable water. iFIX also handles their distribution monitoring and pressure reducing valves to maintain safety for their end consumer. They have water reservoirs monitor physical building sites and emergency power systems through iFIX The Districtalso monitor the iFix and SCADA system itself and use drivers to monitor the system hardware and equipment that's core to providing the SCADA information.
Their engineering group is highly regarded in the water and wastewater industry for automation control systems. Their sewage collection sites consist of a storage tank and multiple types of pumps, and instrumentation to measure the waste water level – with iFIX, they’re able to monitor the pump status, the pump Amperage, the site system information, the valving and vacuum systems, and the priming system where necessary. iFIX alerts them if any of that local control isn’t working as intended.
They’re also monitoring the physical security aspects of sites, the power at the sites, the weather (indoor and outdoor temperature), and water quality. Most sites have emergency power generators, so they'll monitor everything from the generator functionality and common alarms to the power data incoming and the equipment load. They also monitor remote system information from the internal cabinets to make sure that they’re aware if there's a problem that can be prevented from downtime.
They do not have a control room where information is sent – but even on after-hours –they notify specific staff with the information they need. The electricans get the electrical system information, instrumentation techs get the instrumentation systems information, and the operations gets the operations alerts, and so on through the organization. iFIX enables them to analyze and disseminate that information in order to get it to the right people at the right time.
They also pull Historical data and reports from GE Historian. It is used to identify the best time to cut in water system piping or work on a waste water force main. In the wastewater lift stations, it helps predict the best time and how many Vacuum Trucks they would need to overcome the incoming flow for that site and the scheduled work. They use data for their water and sewer comprehensive plans to understand how their utility system is doing and whether they need to upsize pipes for the future growth. They pull data for their federal and state reporting requirements, and also with process change improvement and verify performance on new analytical instrumentation . Their operations team pulls data daily during the summer to understand water reserves lost and gained. Even their finance team uses data from iFIX to look at financial impacts and order to check for discrepancies.
“…it does provide us a view of all of our critical equipment. So all of our work teams can go in and look at there core process and focus resources and where they need to respond. I talked about different teams responsibilities so to go to the lift stations or waste water pump stations, there's a group of people that take care of that, they can look at their sites, quickly go through and scan to see where things look good from a graphical HMI view and historical trending, etc. it helps staff troubleshoot what's going on, look at what happened in the past, and look at the current conditions. We're in a 55 square mile utility District so it helps to send the right amount of resources out to the right places.”