Hi All,
Small issue, but we’ve had to fix a lot of minor leaks lately, and have to turn off the water to the park to do so. Residents don’t really like that, and ask to be notified in advance. Obviously for a big leak, you have to fix it immediately, but for smaller leaks we could give them some notice by email I suppose. Does anyone know if there is a way to fix the leaks without turning off the water? Anyone install isolation valves in their parks at various points to have to abilities to only shut off part of the park? How much notice do you give when you do these repairs?
Thanks
Aaron
When a city makes a repair the water stays on, and they use pumps to get rid of the water so they can install a clamp around the broken pipe, among other solutions depending on the issue.
The City of Houston busted an 8 foot water main recently and had to turn off the water for 2 days to about 700,000 residents. There was a boil water notice during that time and also a clearing procedure to ensure the potentially “bad water” was drained from your home. We also had to replace filters in our RO system etc.
We have not had a break in our lines that required turning off the water yet, but it’s a new park.
We recently replaced all the water lines in my park because I got sick of repairs. When we did that we installed submeters and shut-off valves so we can avoid shutting down the whole park if there is leak in one section in the future. All homes have several shut-offs… one before and one after the meter and one by the home.
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Rules for notices for water shut offs are usually regulated by the Utility commission or other such agency. Usually two categories are recognized emergency and scheduled repairs. General policy is 3 to 5 days for scheduled repairs, an emergency is obviously an emergency but you should have someone blasting out water outage notice while repair is in the works. Industry standard is a boil water notice is to be issued whenever pressure drops to 0. Boil notice can only be lifted after lab samples verify water is safe to drink i.e. no coliform bacteria present. It takes 18 to 24hrs to have results from lab. Develop a SOP for your park and follow it.
Doing the repair “hot” (with the water on) is preferred but on small Systems it just doesn’t usually work. Valves in wrong spot, main line completely fails. If you can keep some of the homes live with isolation valves it reduces the number of complaints
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Depending on where the break is you can usually fix it live unless it is a main. We have isolation points in our community to minimize the inconvenience to the residents. If we have to shut the park down we use Facebook and we have used the auto call systems before, like OneCall. You can upload your residents info and program a call, text, or email to go out to them regarding the water situation. We also wait until the very last minute to shut it off, we dig as far as we can with our pump on until it can’t keep up, this minimizes the inconvenience.
The other thing to think about is your water cost you could be wasting by not fixing the small leaks right away. If you have to shut the park down try to do as many as you can at once!
I cannot imagine not having shut off valves periodically that allow us to shut off sections of a park versus the entire park. That would get old fast.
Todd