250 Water Assets Monitored from the Electrical Supply

Anglian Water has signed a two-year extension to its condition-based monitoring framework with Samotics, agreed in April and reported on 1 September. The framework covers more than 250 clean water assets, and it is the first major renewal since the initial three-year agreement in March 2023; the partnership itself dates to November 2020 and is now in its sixth year.

The technical approach is what makes this worth attention. Samotics' SAM4 uses electrical signature analysis, monitoring equipment remotely from the electrical supply rather than from sensors mounted on the asset. The motor is treated as its own transducer: mechanical faults downstream of it — cavitation in a pump, a worn bearing, a misaligned coupling — modulate the current and voltage waveforms in characteristic ways, and those signatures can be read at the motor control centre.

For a water utility that property is close to decisive. Clean water assets are distributed across hundreds of sites, many of them small, unstaffed and awkward to reach. Mounting accelerometers on every pump means visiting every site, running cable in wet environments, powering the sensor, getting the data back over whatever connectivity exists, and then maintaining the sensors themselves — a monitoring fleet that needs its own maintenance regime. Reading the same information from the switchroom collapses all of that: the connection point is indoors, already powered, already has a panel, and one installation covers the machine regardless of where the machine is.

The reported performance is specific: detection of cavitation, bearing wear and misalignment with 97 per cent accuracy and fewer than 1 per cent false positives. The false positive figure is the one that determines whether a programme survives, because a system that cries wolf gets ignored by the people it is supposed to help, and at 250 assets even a few per cent produces a steady stream of pointless call-outs. Anglian Water reports preventing £886,800 in costs since 2020 through early fault detection and avoided failures.

The extension also adds monitoring at new pumping stations being commissioned across the Strategic Pipeline Alliance programme — which is the more interesting half, since fitting condition monitoring at commissioning gives a baseline from the machine's first day rather than from whenever somebody decided to start watching. Andy Smith, smart water systems senior manager at Anglian Water, framed it as understanding what assets are telling you before problems affect service.