Abstract
A project to assess the levels of leakage in 30 water utilities throughout South Africa was initiated by the Water Research Commission. The BENCHLEAK software was used to evaluate the water utilities and performance indicators calculated by the model were used to compare levels of non-revenue water. Results showed that utilities ranked differently according to the different indicators, and that the South African results are similar to world norms. Feed back from the water utilities showed that some of the data requested were confusing and required clarity. The number of service connections, apparent losses and length of pipe between the street edge and the meter were looked at in more detail. Standard drawings were developed to assist water utilities in determining their number of service connections. A table is presented to assess the apparent losses of each water utility in a more pragmatic way. Water SA Vol. 30 (5) 2005: pp.25-32
Highlights
There is an increasing awareness in South Africa that water is limited and that careful management should be applied when dealing with this scarce resource
A table is presented to assess the apparent losses of each water utility in a more pragmatic way
As the software has been available for sometime in South Africa, it was considered worthwhile to build on the previous work and to carry out a detailed analysis of leakage in selected water utilities
Summary
There is an increasing awareness in South Africa that water is limited and that careful management should be applied when dealing with this scarce resource. Some confusion had been experienced by the water utilities in the previous project with regard to certain of the input parameters for the model, namely, the number of service connections and the estimation of apparent losses It is of little value comparing water utilities if they have made their own assumptions with regard to key elements of the benchmarking calculation. For this reason, standard drawings were developed to assist users in assessing the number of service connections in their systems as well as the levels of apparent losses. Standard approaches for dealing with various inputs required for the model have been developed and are presented
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