by Geoff Fox
The Town of Hancock Water Department has a new tool to check how water is flowing in the pipes under the streets.
Mayor Roland Lanehart said the crews can put a correlator at one end of a street and another end and it would check the water flow in the pipes.
Councilman David Kerns added they can be put on valves and with the six receivers; the flow can be tracked for two weeks to see what is showing up.
The flow shows up as a noise when looking at the graph, he said, and is “pretty close” to where the issue could be.
The mayor said the equipment cost the town $8,000 but in the long run, once it starts finding leaks, it’s going to save the town a lot of money and water.
Town Manager Mike Faith said crews are already trained to use the new monitoring tool and once leaks are found, the town can prioritize which ones to fix first.
Lanehart used a recent leak near his garage as an example of how the readings work.
After the repair, a reading was done for the next four days. Lanehart said the leak was 80,000 gallons a day.
“Our usage was 300,000 gallons a day. Once they fixed that leak, it went down to 220,000 gallons a day,” he said.
“The good news is that money is all… it’s not being clawed back,” Faith said.