Find out where the runoff is getting into your sewer.

You are paying to treat rainwater

Inflow and infiltration is the quiet line item on a small utility’s budget. Snow melts, the ground saturates, and clean water finds every crack, bad joint, failed lateral, and leaking manhole lid in the collection system. It arrives at the plant looking like sewage, and it gets billed like sewage: pumped, treated, and discharged at full cost, all spring, every spring.

The frustrating part is that the fix is well understood. You repair the pipe. Public works directors do not need to be sold on lining, grouting, or replacement. What stops the project is one question nobody can answer cheaply: where is the water getting in? A collection system is miles of buried pipe. Smoke testing, dye testing, and camera crews all work, but pointing them at the whole system is expensive, and pointing them at the wrong stretch is worse.

Multi-point level monitoring answers the question first, so the expensive tools go straight to the right block.

How measuring at several points localizes the source

Start with the one fact that makes this work: water can only join the pipe between two measuring points.

Put a wireless sensor at a manhole near the top of the run, another farther down, another below that, and so on down the line. Each sensor reads the depth of water in the pipe, hourly, and reports on its own over cellular. Now, during a runoff event, you are not looking at one number at the plant. You are looking at a row of numbers down the length of the line.

Read them in order:

• Points one and two are behaving normally for the conditions. Nothing unusual has joined the pipe above them.
• Point three is running well above its own normal. Something joined the line between point two and point three.
• Points four and five are elevated by roughly the same amount as point three, and no more. They are just carrying what point three already had.

That is the whole method. The jump between two neighbors is the signature of water entering in the stretch between them. You have gone from “somewhere in miles of buried pipe” to “between these two manholes,” which is a length a camera crew can cover in a single visit.

Tighten it by adding points. Bracket the suspect stretch with sensors closer together and the search area halves again. It is the same logic a plumber uses to isolate a leak, applied to a whole collection system, with the sensors doing the walking.

Be clear about what is on the screen: depth, not gallons. Each sensor reports how deep the water is in the pipe at that point. We are not deriving a flow rate from velocity and pipe geometry at every hole, and the localization does not need one. What points at the defect is the change at each location against its own dry-weather record, and where that change jumps between neighbors. If a permit or an engineer needs volume figures, say so during scoping and we will tell you plainly what this data can and cannot support.

The dry-season baseline is what makes the comparison honest

Skip this step and the data is close to meaningless.

Depth in a pipe depends on slope, diameter, how much real sewage that section carries, and what time of day it is. A manhole on a flat run naturally sits deeper than one on a steep run. Comparing raw depth between two points tells you about the pipe, not about infiltration.

So the first thing we install for is summer. Through the dry season, when the only thing in the line is what the town actually flushes, every point builds its own record: normal depth, the daily rhythm, the morning and evening peaks. That record is the reference.

When runoff season arrives, each point is compared against its own baseline, not against its neighbors’ raw numbers. Now the question is clean: how much has this point risen above what it does in dry weather, and how much more has it risen than the point above it? Increases that stand out from the baseline are the ones that point at a defect. Everything else is just the system doing what it always does.

This is why an I&I study is not a one-week rental. It is a season of quiet reference data, then the event you were waiting for, and both halves have to come from the same sensors in the same holes.

Dirty water is why the sensor never touches it

Meterra reads these lines with non-contact ultrasonic sensing. The sensor mounts above the water and measures the distance down to the surface. Nothing goes in the flow.

That matters more in a sewer than anywhere else we work. Sewage carries solids, grease, grit, and rags. Storm water carries sand and leaf litter. Anything you suspend in that stream is on a clock: impellers bind, probes foul, and floats end up wrapped in whatever came down the pipe last week. A sensor reading the surface from above has nothing in the water to clog, corrode, or wrap, which is what makes a full season of unattended baseline data realistic.

Clean water is a different job, and we are straightforward about it. Pressurized, potable, clean supply lines are where a mechanical turbine meter belongs, and where you want gallons totalized rather than depth trended. That is our Water Flow Monitor, and for a filled supply line it is the better instrument. Non-contact ultrasonic is for the dirty side: sanitary sewers, storm-water drains, culverts, ditches, and open channels.

The same sensor design has been in the field for 4+ years, with 2,000+ devices in service, on Verizon NB-IoT low-power cellular, with satellite where coverage will not reach. Sensors run on their own battery, so there is nothing to wire at the manhole. Mounting and cellular signal at each specific point are confirmed during scoping, before anything is quoted.

Where this stands today, stated plainly

The Powder Mountain job — a mountain-resort sewer system above Eden, Utah — came to us with exactly this problem: every spring, runoff infiltrates the sanitary line, and treating that clean water as sewage costs them real money. They want to repair the pipe. They do not know where to dig.

We are running the method described on this page for them: Meterra ultrasonic sensors at multiple points along the line, dry-season baseline first, then point-to-point comparison during spring runoff to localize the infiltration zone.

Proof-of-concept work is complete, so the approach is validated. The full deployment is underway. That is the honest status. There are no measured savings to report, no repair outcome, and no finished savings numbers, because the season that produces those numbers has not run yet. When it does, the numbers will go on this page and they will be theirs, not ours. The install videos and the rest of the job — including the evaporative-pond sensors already reporting into their legacy SCADA — are on the Powder Mountain job’s case study.

Getting the readings into the system you already run

Plenty of utilities want this data where their operators already look. Meterra builds a small bridge, a Raspberry-Pi-class computer, that takes the wireless reading and emulates the signal your existing control system expects. For a legacy input, that signal is a 4-20 mA current loop, so a legacy SCADA or PLC reads the wireless sensor exactly as if a hardwired transmitter were sitting on the end of a wire pair. Modbus is the other path, for when one connection has to carry many readings.

No trenching, no new I/O panel, no rip-and-replace of a SCADA that works. That is the whole point of the bridge, and it is covered in detail on Wireless SCADA Integration. Like the line study itself, it is engineered and quoted per site.

If the rest of your collection system needs eyes too, Wastewater Lagoons & Lift Stations covers wet wells, freeboard, and high-level alarms on the same dashboard and the same account.

What it costs, and why one number is posted and one is not

Our level sensors are posted, and we like being compared on them. The Tank Level Sensor is $299, the Trough Level Monitor is $399, and the Dam Level Monitor is $499. Each includes three months of connectivity, then plans run from $10/month per device, with a 60-day money-back guarantee and a one-year warranty on every unit. Sensors ship from US stock, tank sensors in 1 to 2 business days. No quote call to find out the hardware price.

The line study is different, and we will say why instead of hiding it in a form. Placing sensors down a sewer run is a scoped project: how many points, where they can mount, what the cellular coverage is at each hole, how long the baseline needs to run, and whether the readings have to land in your SCADA. Those decisions are made about your line, so the price is made about your line. We are not going to print a number that pretends otherwise. The sensor that does the measuring carries a price tag you can read right now. The study around it gets a scope and a real quote, in writing, before anything is built.

Next step

Tell us the run that worries you most: roughly how long it is, how many manholes are accessible, and what your plant sees when the snow goes. We will tell you how many points it takes to bracket it and what it costs to find out.

Request pricing below or call (801) 742-1319 and talk it through with a person. If you want to see the sensor first, it is the Tank Level Sensor, $299, posted.