Water loss auditing and district metering
Non-revenue water is measured, not estimated. A clamp-on meter on a transmission main gives you the district inflow figure without a chamber, a bypass or a shutdown.
Temporary district metering
Permanent district meter installations are expensive and slow to permit. A rental clamp-on meter lets a utility establish whether a proposed district metered area is worth instrumenting before committing capital — measure inflow for a month, compare against billed consumption, and see whether the loss figure justifies the installation.
Night flow analysis
The classic leak indicator is minimum night flow. Between roughly 2 and 4 in the morning, legitimate demand in a residential district approaches zero, and whatever the meter still reads is largely loss. The UF801-P resolves velocity changes down to ±0.03 ft/s, which on a large main is a meaningful volume, and it logs at intervals fine enough to characterise the night minimum properly.
Getting a usable reading on a buried main
- You need access to the pipe. A valve chamber, an air valve pit or an exposed crossing. There is no way around this — the sensors must touch the pipe.
- Cement-lined ductile iron is the common case and the common error. The lining thickness must be entered separately from the wall thickness. Getting it wrong shifts the effective bore and the flow figure with it.
- Tuberculation. An old unlined cast iron main may have a significantly reduced effective bore. The meter cannot see this, and it will report flow based on the diameter you entered.
- Wet chambers. Specify the IP68 sensor option. Chambers flood.
What a month of data gives you
Diurnal demand profile, weekday against weekend pattern, minimum night flow trend, and enough resolution to see whether a suspected leak is growing. That is the input to a water balance, and it is the difference between reporting a real loss percentage and reporting an assumption.