Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) has invested GH¢4.2 million to acquire and install 373 bulk water meters at all main stations across the country to closely monitor the revenue from treated water produced.
This will help GWCL, the grantor, and Aqua Vitens Rand Limited (AVRL), operator of the urban water system, to determine the actual non-revenue
water, the causes and take appropriate measures to rectify them.
The meters, which came in various sizes, would be installed at the company's head works, treatment plants and production centres, booster pump stations and reservoirs across the country.
The first few bulk meters were installed at the GWCL main production station at Kumasi a few weeks ago and on Tuesday three out of the eight earmarked for installation at the Weija Water Works were also installed.
Because of the installation, all four water pumps at Weija were shut down and water supply to parts of Accra was interrupted for at least 24
hours to allow the engineers to fix the bulk meter.
Mr. John Abu-Gyansah, Distribution Specialist and Project Manager for the installation, told journalists that the pumps would be re-opened at 1800 hours on Tuesday and water would reach the public eight hours later.
It is estimated that about 50 per cent of treated water produced nationwide, valued at about GH¢100 million, is not accounted for due to
leakages and illegal connections.
Three years ago AVRL was competitively awarded a World Bank sponsored contract as operator of urban water system to help reduce loses by 25 per cent in five years and to help make the sector commercially viable.
But due to the lack of specific benchmarks and baseline figures it had been difficult to measure the performance of AVRL because actual commercial and physical loses had been difficult to calculate owing to the absence of bulk meters to provide those figures.
Mr. Abu-Gyansah said the bulk meters funded through the World Bank grant were being supplied and installed by DWA Dizengoff Ghana Limited.
He said the bulk meters would supply information on water supplied to the public, which would then be compared with revenue generated to know the specific amount of non-revenue water.
"We will also install zonal meters at various locations to provide information on how much water goes to specific zones and how much revenue
comes from those zones."
"We will then be able to determine how much of the water is being lost to physical leakages and how much is due to illegal connections and take steps to rectify the situation," he said.
Mr. Louis Lategan, Operations Manager of Dizengoff, supervising installation of the meters, said the meters were configured to supply
information through sms (ed.correct) messages to the phones of specific station managers and also via email to all stations of GWCL and AVRL.
He explained that the system, which operates on third generation (3G) technology, would automatically generate sms messages on only emergency information such as low flow, negative flow or low pressures and transmit them to the phones of the heads specific stations concerned within every one to five seconds.
"But general information about the operations of the distribution systems nationwide will all go to a single server which will then generate
messages and send them by email to GWCL and AVRL offices nationwide," he said.
Meanwhile, the pumps had been shut down for the installation of the bulk meters, the production team at Weija took advantage to undertake some maintenance work, which would have warranted another shut down.
Mr. Michael Amuakwa, Greater Accra Regional Production Manager, told journalists that he and his team took advantage of the shutdown to fix some leakages in the non-return valves and to clean the screens which stop foreign particles such as refuse from entering the pumps.
He showed journalists particles such as plastic waste, and domestically generated refuse stuck up in the screen, saying that "these are domestic waste that people throw into the body bodies and they come here to disturb our machines."
They also took advantage of the shutdown to clean and disinfect the contact tanks, which were full of algae and other organisms that thrive in
water.