A water utility was pumping substantially more into a district than it could account for at customer meters. The loss was real money, but the mains could not be shut down to install measurement, and the leaks — if that is what they were — were small enough that a crude meter would miss them.
A segment-by-segment survey with a portable clamp-on meter on the live mains, hunting for the discrepancy. The Ultraflux UF801-P was chosen specifically for its ±0.03 ft/s velocity resolution — the losses being chased were small, and a meter that cannot resolve a small velocity cannot find a small leak. Night-flow readings on each district metered area gave the clearest signal: sound districts approached zero overnight, leaking ones did not.
Pipe material triage first. Parts of the network were cement-lined ductile iron, where a delaminated liner can stop the signal. Those segments were identified and tested for signal before being relied on, rather than assumed to work.
Leak detection lives or dies on low-velocity resolution and on night-flow measurement. And on a network with cement-lined DI, test the pipe before you trust the survey — the instrument that reads perfectly on one segment may get nothing on the next.
Send us the pipe and the fluid and we will tell you what will actually work.
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