Water and Sewage Lift Station Management

Lift stations, or pump stations as they are more generally known outside the USA, are used to "lift" liquid uphill - against gravity. They are the essential component of a wastewater collection system which takes wastewater from residents and businesses in a community and pumps it to a sewage treatment plant. And they are equally essential in moving "potable" water from a water treatment plant up to one or more reservoirs, so that the clean water can flow by gravity to the community.

Sewage Lift Stations

The sewage treatment plant uses a variety of processes to purify the wastewater so that it is suitable for discharge into rivers, creeks and the oceans.

Managing the network of sewage lift stations that pumps to the treatment plant has become steadily more demanding as regulation from governments (e.g. via the EPA - or Environmental Protection Agency - in the US) has increased. Discharge of sewerage is definitely an environmental hazard, and avoiding spills is much more challenging than most outsiders would think.

Pumps can block, level sensing devices can foul up, or fail, pipes can crack, lightning or power surges can damage control equipment, and power to control pumps can simple fail.

With all of these real and present hazards, ensuring no spills is a demanding occupation.

The standard approach to ensuring that wastewater lift stations are well protected is to put in sophisticated control devices that are monitored remotely from a SCADA or telemetry system.

These lift station controllers are most commonly a PLC/RTU (i.e., a PLC with communications capability, or an RTU with programmable logic capability), often a pump controller - and more recently, a pump station manager (like MultiSmart).

Water Lift Stations

Water lift stations or pump stations have very similar overall requirements to sewerage lift stations. Even though a spill of water isn't an environmental hazard, a lack of clean water supplied to the community is a major problem. When the residents and business turn on their taps, they expect to get drinking water.

As a result, water lift stations are controlled and monitored in very similar ways to wastewater lift stations. One of the key differences is that communications between stations is an integral part of the control system. This is different from the sewerage lift stations which usually work autonomously most of the time, with occasional over-rides from SCADA. 

The most common example would be a water lift station at the water treatment plant, pumping up to a reservoir. The level in the reservoir has to be reliably communicated to the lift station, otherwise the reservoir may run dry, or - often just as bad - be overflowing and wasting the community's valuable resource.

A similar example is where a booster pump station is supplying one reservoir from another. In this case, the decision whether or not to pump is based on the level in both reservoirs. The logic is often very dependant on the local requirements, and also has to cater for loss of communications.

Find out why MultiSmart is the best choice for controlling lift stations, and request a demonstration today!