01 Opportunity
A water utility ran a recycled-water scheme made up of several sites — pump stations, a transfer station and chlorine dosing — that had been built and extended over many years. Each site had its own ageing controller, its own wiring and its own one-off screens, so no two behaved quite the same way. Keeping water moving and dosed correctly meant sending people to site to check levels, start pumps and chase faults.
The risk was the kind that doesn’t show up until it’s a problem: obsolete controllers with parts no longer available, knowledge sitting with one or two people, and no reliable picture of what each site was doing without driving there. The brief was to modernise the controls, make every site behave the same way, and bring the whole scheme back into one control room.
02 Solution
Every site was rebuilt to one control standard on a modern Siemens platform — the same logic, the same operator screens and the same alarms everywhere, so an operator who knows one site knows them all. Pumps, valves, instruments and dosing equipment are all built from the same library of standard, proven control blocks.
The pumps look after themselves. Variable-speed drives run under automatic duty/standby rotation, so run hours are shared evenly, no single pump wears out ahead of the others, and standby capacity is always ready. Levels and pressure are held to setpoint by automatic control, and pumps are brought in and out in a controlled sequence to avoid the pressure surges that stress pipework and joints. Chlorine dosing and high-voltage supply monitoring were brought into the same standard rather than left as separate one-off systems.
Above the sites sits one control room. Levels, flows, pressures, pump status, run hours, dosing and alarms for every site appear on one set of screens, built to the same standard as the logic underneath. Operators can see and control the whole scheme without leaving the desk, and a fault raises a clear alarm the moment it happens instead of waiting to be found on a site visit.
03 Outcome
The scheme now runs to one standard. Every site starts, rotates and protects its pumps the same way, dosing and supply are monitored on the same screens, and the control room has a live, reliable picture of all of them at once. Routine site visits just to read a level or start a pump are gone.
Because every site is built the same way, fault-finding is faster, training is simpler, and the utility is no longer dependent on obsolete one-off controllers or the few people who remembered how each old site was wired. Control standard, software, screens, instrumentation and commissioning were delivered as one scope — one standard applied consistently across the whole scheme.
04 Project highlights
- Multiple pump-station, transfer and dosing sites brought onto one common control and SCADA standard
- Variable-speed pumps run under automatic duty/standby rotation — run hours shared evenly, standby capacity always ready
- Levels and pressure held to setpoint by automatic control; pumps sequenced in and out to avoid pressure surges on the network
- Chlorine dosing and high-voltage supply monitoring built into the same standard, not bolted on separately
- Every site uses the same screens, the same logic and the same alarms, so any operator can run any site
- Full remote telemetry and control to a central control room — faults raise a clear alarm the moment they happen