Subsystem Water Balances That Drive Smarter Investments

For engineers at water utilities, subsystem water balances are essential for managing leakage and planning new infrastructure.

They reveal minimum night flows that underpin leakage management and provide capacity assessment metrics that can defer costly capital works.

Yet in 2025, the sheer volume of SCADA monitoring data makes these balances harder than ever.

One utility recently sent us a flow meter file with 148 million rows. Open it in Excel and less than 1% of the data is visible.

For them this wasn’t just inconvenient, it was a roadblock to critical infrastructure decisions.

On top of scale, engineers must also battle data gaps and anomalies like “negative consumption”, caused by a misalignment in timesteps between multiple sensors in a water balance.

Without effective treatment, data gaps and anomalies delay reporting and decision-making.

Subsystem water balances hold immense value - but only if utilities can overcome these barriers.

Why Subsystem Water Balances Matter

Utilities that successfully conduct subsystem water balances unlock insights that drive better outcomes across their networks, such as:

• Capacity Assessments — metrics are linked to Net Present Value analysis, ensuring upgrade timing is optimized.

• Leakage Monitoring with Minimum Night Flows (MNFs) — MNFs provide reliable baselines for identifying leakage and ranking subsystems so engineers can prioritize maintenance where the return is highest.

Removing the Noise - Fixing Negative Consumption

Negative consumption commonly occurs in the off-peak period when demand is low and when subsystems have multiple sensors. This issue is linked to a misalignment in timesteps between sensors.

The outcome is misleading profiles showing erroneous negative consumption.

For engineers, these anomalies create doubt and delay decision-making about night flows and system consumption.

SensorClean automatically infills negative consumption with cleaned data linked to weekday/weekend behavior, holidays, and seasonality.

Filling the Gaps in SCADA Data

Engineers know the pain of missing data. Sensors drop out, values flatline, or spike unpredictably.

Yet leakage reports, capacity assessments, and infrastructure planning must still be delivered.

Instead of patching gaps manually, utilities using SensorClean see their data repaired in seconds.

Engineers can then shift their focus from fixing data to interpreting insights - the work that truly adds value.

Making Complex Subsystems Simple

As part of our consulting work, a utility wanted us to analyze a subsystem with 23 sensors - a mix of inflows, outflows, and tanks.

Their goal was to understand subsystem capacity better.

Doing this in a spreadsheet would have been virtually impossible. Just preparing the raw data into a consistent format could have taken weeks.

Instead, their engineers simply uploaded the 23 raw CSV files to OneDrive, where our ‘BaseClean’ algorithm could read and process it.

What would once have been weeks of frustration turned into actionable insights in a couple of hours.

The Big Data Advantage in Water Balances

For utilities, the story is clear - subsystem water balances remain one of their most powerful tools - but only when the data can be trusted.

With SensorClean, engineers can quantify and monitor leakage faster, deliver more reliable capacity assessments, and make better-informed asset decisions.

The platform gives utilities the automation and scale they need to keep pace with the big data age.

The result is faster reporting, clearer insights, and more confident decisions - across the network and for the communities they serve.

See the Value Before You Commit

We know that introducing new software can raise questions for IT teams.

That’s why we start with a simple, low-risk consulting engagement. Your utility securely shares SCADA data via OneDrive, and we return a detailed data mining report.

This first step shows exactly how clean, automated water balance analytics can accelerate reporting and strengthen decisions - without the need for system integration or IT disruption.

If you see the benefits, you can move forward with the SensorClean platform.

If not, you still walk away with actionable insights to support leakage management and capacity planning.

Ready to see what your SCADA big data is hiding? Get in touch to schedule your first data mining report.