In Austria, municipalities must digitalise their water supply and sewer systems in order to receive federal funding for drinking water and wastewater projects from 2026. Stadtwerke Wolfsberg is using GNSS technology from ppm GmbH to fulfil this requirement in the short time available and at the same time make its infrastructure more efficient and sustainable.
Stadtwerke Wolfsberg in Carinthia has to monitor, maintain and regularly expand over 400 kilometres of water pipes and around 340 kilometres of sewers in order to guarantee and further improve the security of supply for around 25,000 citizens.
What’s more, all municipalities in Austria must have digitally recorded their supply networks by the end of the year in order to be able to access subsidies from the federal government in future. Time is of the essence, which is why Stadtwerke Wolfsberg has decided to survey all lines itself and enter them in a register. This procedure not only saves time, but also costs.
Precise measurement without experts
Thanks to the GNSS technology from ppm GmbH, the employees of Stadtwerke Wolfsberg can record all the positions of their sewer networks themselves: The ppm10xx zero GNSS sensor receives signals from various global satellite navigation systems (Global Navigation Satellite System, GNSS for short). The most important GNSS systems include the US GPS, the European GALILEO, the Russian GLONASS and BEIDOU from China. This ensures that sufficient signals are available and can be processed everywhere and at all times. Even in difficult environments, for example under leafy trees or near house walls, the instrument can be used to record position data with centimetre-level accuracy.
Before the ppm10xx zero was used, double the manpower was required for the measurements: Stadtwerke Wolfsberg commissioned external service providers and also sent a colleague from its own ranks. Only they knew the lines that were to be surveyed. Since the acquisition of the ppm10xx zero, the employees of Stadtwerke Wolfberg have been able to carry out all measurements themselves.
Easy handling, seamless data integration
The ppm10xx zero sensor is particularly easy to use. No surveying knowledge is required – a short briefing is all it takes. The ppm10xx zero GNSS sensor is connected to a tablet PC via Bluetooth LE. The Geolantis360 surveying software, which is optimised for municipal applications, is installed on the tablet. To record a specific position, it is sufficient to tap the corresponding point on the displayed map.
Real-time synchronisation between the application on the tablet in the field and the desktop software in the office is also possible. The ppm Commander software, which serves as a link between the GNSS receivers and almost any user programme, enables data transfer without media discontinuity and loss of accuracy. This allows the field service to synchronise measurements and data with the central system immediately. This means that the data is always up to date and the hours or even days of data transfer in the office after a field inspection are generally no longer necessary.
Future-proof networks
The digital recording of water supply and sewer systems makes a decisive contribution to a sustainable and future-proof infrastructure. In some municipalities, there is no consistent documentation, which makes maintenance work much more difficult, for example.
‘In discussions with municipalities, we often hear that pipes are only documented on paper and that these were created a very long time ago, so that the buildings and house numbers marked on them no longer exist. We have also had cases where the underground routes of pipes and sewers in parts of a municipality are completely unknown because the people responsible left a municipality decades ago and the knowledge of the pipes was not passed on,’ explains Andreas Keller, Sales Manager for Germany, Switzerland and Austria at PelicanCorp.
GNSS technology makes it easy to catch up on incomplete documentation in order to document the infrastructure and optimise it for the future.
© Picture: PelicanCorp