From Freeze to Fix: Limestone County’s Approach to Water Management

Planning for such explosive growth has been a challenge. "It is really predicated on which farmer is going to sell land," said LCWSA CEO Daryl Williamson. "And out in our county, we have no zoning and no ordinance of any kind…it literally is the wild, wild West."

A Rocky Start for Limestone

In 2015, LCWSA decided to install an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system. However, by the time the system was fully deployed in 2018, it had already begun to fail.

Anxious to rectify the situation, LCWSA issued a new RFP. With so much already invested, one of the key requirements was that the new system would be able to read any of LCWSA's existing meters that were still valid and working.

"We had every vendor out," Williamson said. "Badger Meter was ultimately the only one that could come to the table and successfully read those other meters."

LCWSA was also excited about the cellular communication aspect of the system. ORION^® Cellular endpoints use existing cellular infrastructure managed and maintained by outside carriers, which minimizes potential downtime and eliminates the need for utility-owned gateway infrastructure.

"We're water and sewer folks," Williamson said. "We did not have RF specialists on staff. We didn't have collector specialists. I don't have bucket trucks. So that furthered Badger Meter rising to the top of the vendor pool because…my staff could support it. The cellular technology just worked for us."

Finding Their Edge

In addition to the ORION Cellular endpoints, LCWSA's AMI system comprised E-Series^® and E-Series G2^® Ultrasonic meters, E-Series Ultrasonic Plus meters, Recordall^® Disc Series meters with high-resolution M25 and M55 encoders and Recordall Compound Series meters. LCWSA also utilizes the BEACON^® Software as a Service (SaaS) platform to manage and analyze meter data.

Out of the Cold

The new AMI system was put to the test in January 2024, when parts of Alabama experienced a record cold snap. For a week straight, temperatures plummeted to the teens and single digits. "We quickly learned that Southerners do not do well at winterization," Williamson said.

When water utility staff came into work and opened BEACON, they were shocked to discover that 20% of the system was showing significant leaks. "You start looking at 20% of 30,000 meters, you're like, 'Golly, where do I even begin?'" he said. "The fortunate news there is, with Badger Meter and BEACON, you can start prioritizing those leaks…so we started working on them from the largest to the smallest."

LCWSA staff began a targeted effort to address the water loss, reaching out to affected customers and repairing breaks based on their level of severity. "Prior to installation of BEACON and the Badger Meter system, we would have been riding the roads looking for leaks," Williamson noted.

The data available in BEACON further revealed an unexpected detail: not all the water loss was caused by leaks. "We were able to aggregate total demand and look at our pressure zones and say, 'Hey, this is how much demand is going through, this is how much the plant's pushing,'" he explained. It all pointed to a spike in customer demand.

LCWSA found that customers were letting their faucets drip to keep their pipes from freezing during the cold weather. "But their drips were not drips," Williamson said. "They were just running every faucet and so they literally ran the system out of water."

While LCWSA worked with local news outlets and social media to educate customers about how to properly drip their faucets, the BlueEdge technology suite helped utility staff to proactively address other challenges brought on by the cold snap, including pressure loss that threatened water quality.

The MetriNet multiparameter water quality monitor is a low-power, modular system for monitoring water quality and collecting data—including pressure—at remote locations. "[With the MetriNet data,] we were able to monitor system pressures in real-time…and determined [that] we did drop below the 20 pounds required," Williamson recalled. LCWSA was able to act quickly to issue a boil water notice and safeguard public health.

Communicating with Customers

The data available to LCWSA through BEACON has been instrumental in improving how the utility interacts with its customer base. If a customer calls to report low pressure, for example, LCWSA staff can use the information in BEACON to investigate whether pressure levels are within an acceptable range. If it's a high bill complaint, staff can quickly review a customer's water usage and explain their consumption patterns.

"You're sitting there looking at their hourly data," Williamson explained, "and you can say, 'Yep, every morning at 4 a.m., you've got irrigation.' We [can] see where it turns on and it runs for a couple of hours."

With the EyeOnWater^® consumer engagement app, LCWSA customers can also manage their own water use. Easy-to-understand consumption graphs and configurable leak notifications provide timely, visual access to their water usage behavior, encouraging conservation. "It's been a great advantage," Williamson said.

Irrigation accounts for a significant amount of water demand in LCWSA’s system—something the utility was able see more clearly thanks to BlueEdge. "In pressure zones that are experiencing high irrigation rates, we're able to take our tank data and the pressure data from the meters and see what those actual pressure drops are," Williamson explained, "which has been great to see…what's really happening in our system."

In fact, having access to real-time pressure data helped LCWSA discover that most irrigation was occurring on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. "They weren't spreading that demand out," Williamson explained. "They were hitting us really, really hard."

Subsequently, LCWSA was able to utilize social media to educate customers and ask them to adjust their watering habits.

Managing Hotspots

Part of LCWSA’s BlueEdge suite includes PIPEMINDER-ONE data loggers used in conjunction with the RADAR pressure management data platform to monitor certain areas. When the pressure drops below a predefined threshold, the system sends an alert.

Water Quality Monitoring

Delivering clean, safe drinking water is the most critical objective for a municipal water system. With that in mind, LCWSA utilizes MetriNet and pipe::scan to continuously monitor its distribution network for anomalies. The devices proved particularly useful when one of LCWSA's wholesale customers suggested poor water quality was to blame for algae growth in its storage tank.

"Having this MetriNet bollard system and the pipe::scan technology, I could go back and look at our plant to see how much chlorine we were pushing out," Williamson said.

Furthermore, he was able to dive deeper into the distribution system data to determine the exact level of chlorine at the point of delivery to the wholesaler. "Within a period of about 15 minutes and providing them the data that we were seeing coming out of the MetriNet system, we were able to put that conversation to rest and it stopped the finger-pointing."

The Journey Continues

Looking ahead, Williamson said his utility plans to expand its BlueEdge toolset with the addition of more MetriNet units as well as more ultrasonic meters in multiple sizes. He also looks forward to rolling out EyeOnWater to his entire customer base. In the meantime, though, he and his staff will continue to leverage the insights provided by BEACON to streamline and optimize network operations.

"It is a fantastic tool to help you deal with all kinds of issues, and the ease of pulling that data out of the system is just phenomenal," he said. "Out of all the meter systems that I've worked with in different deployments, I have to say that BEACON, far and away, is the easiest meter data management-type system that I've worked with."