Unitywater is implementing digital data loggers for trade waste customers to enhance the monitoring and management of the wastewater network.
Trade waste is different from regular household wastewater as it contains fats, oils, and greases or toxic or harmful substances such as acids, petroleum products, heavy metals, solids, organic solvents, or chlorinated organics. Customers who produce more harmful trade waste have pre-treatment devices installed to help reduce impacts in the wastewater network, where it is safely treated.
Unitywater Executive Manager Customer Experience Katherine Gee said the water utility was about halfway through installing Captis Series 2 digital loggers on meters for 30 trade waste customers—those who generally produce higher-risk, more harmful wastewater.
“Existing meters measure the volume of waste discharged, but these digital loggers will also enable us to monitor when our customers discharge to our wastewater network,” she said. “It’s important to protect our network and the wastewater treatment process to ensure what we treat remains safe for public health and the environment.”
Gee said the Captis Series 2 loggers from Kallipr were designed for larger meters, such as the ones that customers have traded waste.
“Our trade waste customers’ meters are larger to handle their discharge volumes, and these loggers were a good fit and were readily available. We also saw the potential for operational efficiencies and insights we could gather about trade waste discharges from the logger data,” she said.
Gee said trade waste could have serious impacts on treatment operations if not managed carefully.
“Uncontrolled discharge of trade waste may cause serious problems, including overflows, blockages, corrosion, hazardous work environments and failure of the wastewater treatment process,” she said.
“These digital loggers give us readings every hour to ensure our customers comply with their trade waste agreement to help protect their infrastructure and ours. While our Trade Waste Officers will still perform site visits, the loggers will help make our billing process more efficient as they’ll no longer require a manual read by our team.”
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