Spotlight On: The Smart Hub
7 October 2021
By Nic Rawlings, Smart Hub Manager at Welsh Water
It goes without saying that one of our very top priorities is to ensure our customers receive safe, clean water and dirty water is taken away and treated before releasing back into our beautiful environment.
We deliver these services through our vast network, which not only includes tens of thousands of miles of water mains and sewerage pipes but also our other assets such as water treatment works, wastewater sewerage works, reservoirs and pumping stations. As you can imagine, monitoring these assets alone is a full time job!
Long gone are the days where colleagues would live on or very nearby our assets to ‘keep an eye’ on them just in case something goes wrong. We now rely on a whole range of complex technology and communication channels to alert us that one of our assets isn’t performing as well as it should be, or something has happened which may affect our ability to supply or treat water, like a burst water pipe, a sewer blockage or power cut for example.
Introducing our Smart Hub, which is our control and alarm management centre, based in South Wales. The team are here specifically to monitor the thousands of assets owned by Welsh Water around the clock, 365 days a year. The team of dedicated analysts work shifts to monitor our alarm system, receiving early warning alerts of any problems at our sites or in our water and sewerage network. Our workload is heavily influenced by the time of year and weather conditions. Our alerts are set up to let us know when there are exceptions to the norm. So, when it’s windy, sites may be more susceptible to power cuts; when it’s cold and icy, pipes are more likely to leak or burst; when it’s rainy, our sewers can get overwhelmed; and when it’s sunny and warm, we all like to use more water. All these and many more factors can influence the normal operating of our complex networks and processes and give rise to alerts being produced which need our attention.
Every day, the team regularly deal with nearly 2000 alarms and have great relationships with their operational colleagues located across Wales, and beyond, to ensure that any problems are dealt with quickly and efficiently, without any impact to you, our customers.
Of course, the health and safety of colleagues is always our number one priority, and the Smart Hub team also act as the first port of call should any of them need help in any emergency, especially if they are working alone.
So, next time you go off to bed, sleep well in the knowledge that the Smart Hub and our operational teams are there keeping an eye on the water supply to help ensure everything is just as you left it the night before.