District Metered Area Planning Using Hydraulic Modeling for Water Loss Control

District Metered Areas (DMAs) have been used successfully to manage areas of water distribution systems to monitor for water use, loss and pressure. Historically used in the UK, DMAs are being explored by more systems in the US now as a way to sectorize and break down the distribution system to prioritize water loss reduction activities.

San Jose Water has a long history of water loss control activities. They have permanent acoustic leak detection loggers, remote pressure loggers installed throughout the distribution system, and also a proactive leak detection team. They are in the early stages of implementing AMI. Located in drought-prone California, they decided to further prioritize water loss control by exploring the implementation of DMAs. These DMAs would be used to prioritize the activities of the proactive leak detection team.

This presentation will describe the process of using hydraulic modeling to lay out the DMAs for four large pressure zones (with between 19,400 and 42,600 service connections each) and performing a technology evaluation to select DMA flow meters. Because San Jose Water has a very large, dense water system, the goal of the system was to build the DMAs with multiple flow meters and closed valves while not compromising hydraulics such as fire flow availability and water quality at dead ends. The hydraulic modeling included consideration of various criteria including number of customers, minimizing the number of flow meters and maximizing the number of closed valves, pipe sizes, layout of highways, railroads, critical customers, and other criteria.

San Jose expects to continue this project with a pilot of a DMA and the creation of a dashboard to visualize and analyze the data from the DMA. Eventually, they will continue implementation of more DMAs in the future.