Most utilities have little instrumentation inside the distribution network. Once water leaves a pump station or reservoir, it is hard to know what pressures the pipes experience. This webinar shows how the City of Hamilton closed that gap using hydrant.AI pressure loggers, and what the data revealed about the impact of operational decisions on pressure.
Hamilton operates one of the oldest and most complex water systems in Ontario, with about 2,100 km of water mains, 14,000 hydrants, and 160,000 service connections. Working with Digital Water Solutions and CIMA+, the city deployed hydrant loggers across several pressure districts. The loggers record pressure 100 times per second, along with acoustics and water temperature, and they do it without taking a single hydrant out of service.
Brian Gulin and Janice Takahashi of the City of Hamilton join Sean Ma of CIMA+ and the Digital Water Solutions team to walk through the project, the analysis workflow, and the results.
What You Will Learn
- What hydraulic transients (water hammer and surge) are, and why repeated events matter for pipe health
- How pressure data from hydrant loggers was matched with SCADA pump records to find likely causes of transient events
- Pressure Districts 4 and 16: recurring daily transients that line up with pump starts and stops, and why repeated events can add stress to aging pipe
- Phase three: combining hydraulic modelling, transient modelling, and machine learning to find root causes of transients in Pressure District 1
From Pressure Data to Better Operating Decisions
Pressure monitoring turns assumptions about the network into evidence. In Hamilton, the data showed how pump operations shape pressure across a district, which gives operators a practical basis for adjusting pump schedules, reviewing surge protection, and prioritizing areas with frequent main breaks. It also builds the data foundation for more advanced analytics, including AI-assisted pattern detection.
Watch the full webinar to see how Hamilton is using network monitoring to understand its system, protect its infrastructure, and plan its next phase.
