Using software to monitor the network is essential.
You want to know if:
- there is something going wrong on the network based on unusual patterns of activity (i.e. in addition to simple threshold alarming)
- there is any notable transient activity, its magnitude and how often it is occurring
- alarm thresholds remain appropriate so they don’t alarm when it’s not necessary and so they don’t miss anything important
- an asset requires maintenance (a battery needs changing, a PRV needs servicing, etc.)
Let’s say you have someone check these four things once a day. In reality you might want to check if there’s something wrong every 15 minutes, and check alarm thresholds once a week, but let’s keep it simple.
To check them requires an analyst to review a graph, do some calculations on the data, draw a conclusion and communicate their findings. We’ll be generous and say this can be done in 5 minutes for each logger.
So, every day of the year, 4 parameters are checked for each logger. That’s 365 days x 4 parameters x 5 minutes = 120 man hours per logger per year.
Assuming that an analyst works 220 8 hour days in a year:
|
Number of loggers |
Analysts required |
|
1 |
1 |
|
100 |
7 |
|
500 |
35 |
|
1,000 |
70 |
|
1,434 |
100 |
|
2,000 |
139 |
|
5,000 |
346 |
The largest analyst team we’re aware of in a water company isn’t big enough to review the data in this way for more than a few hundred loggers. But they’re expecting to end up with nearer 10,000 loggers.
What this shows is that fix on fail and maintain on a time/risk basis have been the only realistic options.
Until now. iNet from i2O performs all these functions and more, maximising the return on your investment in logging hardware.