News

Winter Valve Box Asset Management

Posted by Mark Beatty on Dec 04, 2018

Are your valve boxes prepared for winter? There are some things you can do to make your life easier, job in the spring easier, and save some money in the long run with valve box asset management. These involve keeping valve boxes from getting damaged from snow plows, insuring that lids are secure to keep out winter salt, debris, an grime, preventing a long spring valve box clean out program, and finding the valve boxes in the winter snow and ice. If you have a winter main break and need to either access the valve box for a leak detector or leak correlator will you be able to? How much water may leak and freeze if you have to thaw out a frozen broken valve box to shut off a valve in large main break, or if you have to wait on a vac truck to do the clean out?

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Tags: Asset Management, Asset Tag, Kerf Cutter, Mud Plug, valve box, Valve maintenance

My LinkedIn article on the Combiphon Plastic Pipe Locator

Posted by Mark Beatty on May 01, 2018

Acoustic Pipe Locating

Anyone who has used an acoustic leak detector can tell you they can hear a leaky pipe underground. You can also maximize the sound when you are directly over top of the pipe and/or leak to locate it laterally. Therefore, it is possible to find the location of a noisy leaking pipe with most modern leak locators. The Sewerin Combiphon system uses this theory to place a different kind of sound on the pipe to allow locating a non-leaking pipe by the noise emanating from it. The Combiphon system starts with a battery operated generator. The generator can control either a "Knocker" for 2 inch and smaller pipe and tubing, or a "Stopper" for larger water mains. either accessory induces a safe locatable sound on the pipe which can be detected by a typical acoustic pipe locator. The generator has adjustment knobs for both intensity and frequency of the sound generated. Most acoustic leak detectors will work to find the sound, but Sewerin has the A200 and AC200 leak locators optimized with a special software just for acoustic pipe locating. To locate the pipe, the operator sweeps perpendicular across where the pipe is suspected to be located and marks the pipe at the highest sound intensity reading.

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Tags: NonMetallicPipeLocator, PipeLocators, PlasticPipeLocator, PVCPipeLocator

Underground Locating Training with Ohio Rural Water

Posted by Mark Beatty on Jan 15, 2018

We are offering a comprehensive 2 hour training session on underground locating this Wednesday, January 17th at the office of Ohio Rural Water in Zanesville. This will be both a classroom and hands-on session. After the classroom portion, attendees will get to use underground pipe and cable locators and metal locators outside in a real world situation. Ohio Rural Water will be issuing CEU credits for my two hours as well as another speaker's 2 hour session on pipe line maintenance for 4.0 hours of O&M credits available. We will be doing several more of these this year with Ohio Rural...