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5 Game-Changing Ways AI is Transforming Water Management

In the near future, AI-enabled digital twins and advanced predictive analytics will help utilities not just react, but proactively manage resources, keeping water systems resilient and adaptable in an era of growing challenges.

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Guides

Using Better Data to Tackle the Industrial Pretreatment Challenge

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Blog

Better, Faster, Safer: How New AI Tools Could Transform Water Management for the Better

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Blog

Introducing Klir Comply with ChatGPT Integration on Microsoft Azure

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What’s new?

Case Studies

Leaving Linko Behind: How the City of Tyler Streamlined Pretreatment with Klir

7 min read

Case Studies

Less Stress, More Certainty: How North Charleston Modernized Pretreatment with Klir

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Case Studies

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Software Comparisons

Klir vs. Hach WIMS: Choosing a Water Data Management Platform That Makes Sense for You

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Software Comparisons

Whether it’s pathogens, PFAS, flood, drought, or a host of other factors, successful water management comes with a gauntlet of complex and interlinking challenges—and that list is only growing.

To tackle these issues, water and wastewater managers, operators and engineers need a steady stream of easy to access and up to date information related to planning, compliance, risk, sampling results, and numerous other data points. Enterprise and custom-built industrial automations systems have promised to provide exactly that, but haven’t always delivered.

Most operators today continue to work in water data management environments that are incomplete: crucial data remains siloed and underutilized, plant operators continue to struggle with sub-optimal conditions for planning, and adopting a data-based approach to water management continues to be a challenge.

To explore the tradeoffs and sticking points operators face when approaching these challenges, we’re going to look at two different systems today:

Klir

An all-in-one cloud-based operating system for water & wastewater utilities—and more. Klir’s sampling module focuses on delivering fast and up to date water quality results and analysis, and simplifying scheduling and reporting for water monitoring plans across the utility.

Hach WIMS

A water information management solution developed by the Hach Company to complement the company’s water quality testing instruments and processes.

Klir OS and the Klir Sampling Module: A Quick Intro

Until recently, the information that operators and managers at water utilities needed to do their jobs was fragmented, dispersed across numerous systems, incomplete, or otherwise difficult to access.

Launched in 2018, Klir is the first system to bring these disparate functions together into one complete, all-in-one operating system (OS) for water & wastewater utilities.

Instead of relying on a mishmash of different systems and software, Klir brings the entire team onto one platform and pulls in data from lab reports, LIMS, SCADA & GIS to create a single source of truth for sampling activities utility-wide.

This allows operators to:

Work With Trends

See trends across the entire water system—from sampling, to permitting, inspections & more—and make decisions with clarity and confidence.

Use Automation

Automate manual tasks and data analysis that were once tracked in Excel or Outlook, from scheduling sampling runs, to interpreting sampling results, and generating regulatory reports, eliminating 1+ days of admin work each week.

Receive Alerts

Have peace of mind knowing that Klir’s automatic alerts for MCLs and non-compliance will trigger in case anything ever goes wrong, and feel confident that every sample has been completed on time.

Hach WIMS: A Quick Intro

Hach WIMS allows operators and managers to synthesize and analyze together water quality data using queries, charts and custom analytics. Think of it as a powerful version of Excel, custom-built for water.

Although Hach WIMS has been a mainstay in the water industry, it hasn’t received any major overhauls since it was originally introduced, making it very much a product of its time. While it’s helpful for users focused on managing sampling results & interpreting water quality data, it lacks some of the broader functionalities users have come to expect from newer cloud-based software.

Klir vs. Hach: Which One is Right for You?

There are a few key factors that operators need to keep in mind when choosing a system that is right for them. We’ll break them down for you below and sort them into two sections: one for operators that would be better off choosing Klir, and one for operators who might benefit from sticking to Hach.

Klir is an all-in-one system that captures all data for compliance with regulatory and local limits, and is built to handle:

Monitoring plan creation & management
Sample scheduling
SCADA & LIMS import / review
Rule validation
Exceedance warnings
Reporting
Task management
Live data entry for field sampling

Hach WIMS, on the other hand, is meant to support engineers during their daily operations and is built to handle:

Sampling scheduling
SCADA & LIMS import / review
Reporting
Equipment maintenance support
Plant operational workflows

Reasons to choose Klir

1. It’s a Truly Comprehensive System

It used to be that if you wanted a truly comprehensive, all-encompassing view of your organization, you had to wait for an annual report. Klir has changed that by providing operators with a complete view of the organization, allowing them to:

Know they’re compliant, rather than assume it
Consult a single dashboard of relevant internal and regulatory compliance when they log-in
Avoid hunting for information across segments of data in different systems

2. It’s Bulletproof

Cybersecurity is one of the biggest threats for utilities, but these attacks often rely on very boring, unremarkable vulnerabilities. Many are simply the result of over-reliance on outdated software on local devices, or trying to integrate disparate software and systems.

IT leaders within utilities are increasingly setting mandates to reduce the complexity of their stack and are demanding higher security for the applications they choose to keep onboard. Klir provides customers with a little to no integration-required platform that operates with military-grade security.

Klir is cloud-based and can be securely accessed from any device, anywhere, offering your employees and IT managers a safe, secure and bulletproof environment to work in.

3. Maximum Accessibility

Klir focuses on providing a user-friendly, intuitive and accessible experience that is designed to be accessed and used by anyone within the utility, regardless of experience. No need to write queries or build custom dashboards: Klir makes your systems more transparent, rather than less.

Hach and other legacy industrial automation systems are built with the expert user in mind. Intuitive UI, accessibility and readability aren’t a priority in the design of these systems, which means that only water quality experts with advanced analytics knowledge and experience writing queries can get full value out of the system.

4. Built for Focused Collaboration and Task Management

Hach and other legacy systems usually don’t include internal collaboration or communications tools, forcing teams to come up with their own off-platform solutions (usually email).

While Hach focuses primarily on data management and manipulation, Klir allows teams to manage all of their tasks in-app, offering an internal chat and reply functionality, user tagging, and commenting within individual tasks, turning the platform into a single channel for collaboration across the organization.

5. Build Institutional Knowledge Instead of Individual Knowledge

Systems that require specialized expert knowledge often struggle with information ‘siloing’: when one person is out of the office or retires, they often leave a big information gap that can leave work at a standstill.

Klir fixes this problem by offering users a single source of truth that is accessible to everyone in the organization, allowing utilities to be more nimble and responsive.

Reasons Why You Might Choose Hach

While Klir might be the clear choice for operators and managers looking for an all-in-one solution to all of their water information management needs, you might be better sticking with Hach in the following cases:

1. You Prefer a More Hands-On Approach to Analytics

Klir customers appreciate the simplicity of the tool and the ability it gives them to simply get on with their workday: from task management to automated analytics.

Hach comes with a much more customizable analytics toolbox that involves a lot more up-front work. Building your own dashboard can be a challenge, but once you do, the customizability Hach offers starts to pay off down the road with super-granular insight.

All this is to say, if you’d prefer a system that focuses primarily on data integration and custom analyses on that data, you might prefer Hach.

Know they’re compliant, rather than assume it
Consult a single dashboard of relevant internal and regulatory compliance when they log-in
Avoid hunting for information across segments of data in different systems

2. You're Focused on LIMS Integration and Custom Analytics

Hach is super focused on allowing users to build detailed and robust dashboards that are deeply customizable and data-driven.

If you’re less focused on the overall operations of your facility and are focused on choosing a system that best integrates with your existing laboratory information management system (LIMS) and provides this level of customization, Hach might also fit the bill.

How Klir Can Help

Klir is a single, unified operating system for water, pulling every aspect of wastewater management—including compliance, sampling and more—into an easy to use dashboard. Learn more about how Klir can cut down on administration and record-keeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide a level of system-wide visibility unmatched by other water data management systems.

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

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Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

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Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

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Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Blog

Drinking Water Contaminants: How Water Utilities Are Keeping Us Safe

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Blog

Last year the EPA released the biggest overhaul to its Lead and Copper rule since 1991, and in November Congress included $15 billion for lead pipe replacement in its infrastructure plan, signalling that U.S. regulators were finally getting serious about lead in drinking water.

They’ve got their work cut out for them: 10 million service lines in the U.S. continue to be made of lead, which is particularly harmful to children, has a disproportionate impact on low-income communities with aging and outdated infrastructure, and has led to public health crises like the one we saw in Flint, Michigan a few years ago.

That’s why in addition to the new regulations, last week the EPA announced it would open its Lead Strategy up to public input and provide communities affected by lead contamination with the chance to provide verbal input during a series of comment sessions held over Zoom.

But while lead is currently making headlines, it isn’t the only contaminant that drinking water utilities are working hard to keep at bay—and it also isn’t the only contaminant that the general public has a role in helping manage.

Here are six other common drinking water contaminants, how your water provider protects against them, and how you can help.

PFAS

Public awareness of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, has been steadily increasing in recent years. But is it something you should be concerned about?

PFAS are used to make takeout packaging, nonstick pans, food containers and numerous other everyday items. These “forever chemicals” have been linked to a growing number of health problems, including cancer, organ failure, and hormonal changes, and they’re also ubiquitous. (One study estimates that they might already be present in 98 out of every 100 people’s bloodstreams.)

Water providers have a variety of techniques to remove PFAS from drinking water, like ion exchange and reverse osmosis. But because utilities have only started to pay attention to PFAS in recent years, these technologies aren’t yet widely adopted.

If that worries you, there are some actions you can take. Ask your water provider for data on PFAS testing from your area. Avoid Teflon and nonstick pots and pans. Opt for household cleaners that don’t contain PTFE in the ingredients. And if you’re still concerned about PFAS in your home, consider installing a reverse osmosis filtration unit in your home. But be prepared to pay. These units can get expensive.

Chlorine

This is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, excessive chlorine exposure can cause skin and eye irritation. However, chlorine is a “miracle chemical” when it comes to keeping freshwater supplies safe and drinkable. Your tap water contains small levels of chlorine, and that’s critical for filtering out harmful microorganisms.

If you notice your water has a strong chlorine smell, a charcoal filter (like a Brita) can go a long way to neutralizing the taste.

Mercury

Mercury is naturally occurring, and usually appears in non harmful concentrations. However, excess mercury levels from industrial pollution can be extremely harmful. Long term health problems include tremors, decreased mental function, and—in extreme cases—respiratory failure and death.

Thankfully, water providers are very effective at preventing mercury from reaching unsafe levels. So while the health effects of mercury are alarming, it’s unlikely to put your household at risk.

If mercury does concern you, for example, if you’re on well water rather than a municipal water supply, a reverse osmosis or absorption filtration can easily remove 95-97% of mercury from your water.

Pharmaceuticals

Did you know that flushing your unused medication down the toilet can be harmful to your community’s waterways? Trust us—those disposal instructions on your medications are there for a very good reason.

Hospitals and care facilities dispose of an average of 250 million tons of unused medication a year. Can you imagine the impact on your health if that made it into your tap water?

Water pollution from unused medications is usually from medical or manufacturing facilities not following the rules. But chucking a few of your unused pills in the garbage or toilet also adds to the problem. So, the next time you’re emptying out the medicine cabinet, follow those instructions.

Herbicides

Love a lawn that looks its greenest? Then you’ve probably used herbicides. Used to kill unwanted plants (weeds, mostly), herbicides can quickly spread to freshwater sources. Farms and golf courses are the primary culprits of herbicide introduction into water sources, but the herbicides you use to keep your lawn looking fresh also contribute.

Seem harmless? It isn’t. Potential long-term impacts include organ damage (the liver, in particular), hormonal imbalances in children, and cancer.

The good news is that filtration techniques like activated carbon, clay, and peat can all minimize the risks of herbicides, and your water is treated to remove these toxins before it even reaches your tap. Still, when it comes to personal lawn care and gardening, use best practices to prevent unwanted herbicides from entering your community’s water.

Pesticides

Similar to herbicides, pesticides are used to kill unwanted insects and bacteria in agriculture and lawn care. Pesticides can spread to fresh water sources much like herbicides—generally through rainfall and irrigation runoff. Like herbicides, there are a massive number of pesticides out there—and we don’t yet know the long-term health impacts of all of them. However, municipalities and water networks have effective ways to minimize their impacts.

There are a wide range of toxins and pollutants that can have harmful impacts on human health. But generally, the techniques your municipality uses to keep those risks at bay are very effective.

Still, there are small actions we can all take to reduce exposure to potential pollutants, and to help ease the load on your water community’s water provider.

America has some of the world's safest drinking water thanks to the hard work of local water utilities. Do your part to reduce the introduction of further toxins and pollutants into something so fundamental and critical to all of us—fresh water.

Klir is the all-in-one water regulation and compliance platform built by water experts, for water experts. See *how Klir works, and how we can help your utility save time and money—all while keeping your water safer and more secure.***

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Guides

On the Path to Full NPDES Compliance

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Guides

Join the club to get a PDF version you can share with the team or take on-the-go.

Key Takeaways

Wastewater compliance professionals often manage critical data across a patchwork of paper-based, legacy, and modern data management systems. These fragmented systems introduce risk when managing NPDES compliance because there is no single source of truth.
To make progress on significant non-compliance under NPDES, wastewater utilities will need to adopt better data management tools. These can help cut down on repetitive administrative work, make reporting easier and promote a proactive approach to tackling effluent and compliance schedule violations.
These technologies also present wastewater utilities with the opportunity to move ‘beyond compliance’ by adopting practices that promote resiliency and prepare them for longer-term risks.

Compliance with the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit program touches every aspect of what wastewater utilities do—from the sampling and monitoring regimes they implement, to the way IT departments manage their data, to the way operators calibrate and maintain their equipment.

At the same time, many utilities today continue to struggle to consistently meet the terms of their permits. Between a third and half of all major NPDES dischargers report some kind of violation every year, and in 2018 more than one in five found themselves in significant noncompliance (SNC) with NPDES, garnering hefty penalties and hours of headache-inducing paperwork.

Although the EPA's National Compliance Initiative and programs like the Wastewater Expedited Settlement Agreement Pilot have made some inroads, noncompliance remains a problem for wastewater utilities and it pays to consider some of the steps operators, compliance managers and IT professionals can take to address it.

Getting to the Root of Significant Noncompliance

Although effluent discharge and compliance schedule violations are a big problem, according to the EPA more than half of all cases of SNC under NPDES are reporting violations, and 7 out of 10 wastewater SNC violations between 2018-2020 were triggered specifically by a permit holder failing to submit a Discharge Monitoring Report (DMR), the primary method by which dischargers self-report compliance with the conditions of their permits.

National Quarterly DMR Non-Receipt Rate, 2018-2019

What’s driving wastewater’s NPDES reporting problem? At a recent conference, EPA Office of Compliance head David Hindin suggested that everything from regulation complexity to workplace norms could be at play.

“Common sense and our professional judgment may provide an effective basis upon which to implement environmental compliance programs—except when they don’t,” said Hindin.

But while it may be easy to blame these failures on human error, the truth is that operators and compliance professionals at wastewater utilities often work in environments that are uniquely stacked against them from a data and reporting perspective.

Sampling data is often trapped in log sheets, spreadsheets and SCADA systems, creating data opacity and discouraging proactive data analysis practices.
The highly repetitive nature of reporting work itself—often involving the simple act of copying and pasting data from one source to another—creates a breeding ground for basic data entry mistakes.
Compliance and reporting processes remain poorly documented, trapped in the heads of one or a handful of individuals at the wastewater utility, or not documented at all.

This guide lays out steps wastewater utilities can take to avoid these hurdles, do more with the data they already collect, use information technology to build resiliency and cultivate proactive practices, and ultimately set themselves on the path to full compliance under NPDES.

1. Fix the Gaps and Roadblocks in Your Compliance Data Workflows

Over the last two decades, a patchwork of paper-based recordkeeping, legacy software and more modern enterprise software has defined data management practices at wastewater utilities.

Newer data management software is giving wastewater operators the ability to move beyond this status quo, however progress has been slow.

Although many already do an excellent job of sampling and monitoring, it’s too often the case that those efforts are hindered by workflows that are out of date, hard to work with, or simply nonexistent.

Completing a Discharge Monitoring Report (DMR) for a large wastewater utility often involves wading through a variety of different datasets and software tools, and every bit of friction in that process increases the risk of noncompliance. Specific pain points include:

Outdated Legacy Systems

Many facilities continue to manually enter their data into physical log sheets or SCADA systems, which can cause problems when it comes time to get that data back out and into the hands of a regulator. Additional data entry work, unfriendly user interfaces and slow software can turn tasks that should take minutes into ordeals that can take hours.

Error-Prone Reporting Tasks

Much of the work involved in NPDES compliance and reporting is highly repetitive, often involving copying and pasting data over and over again from spreadsheets and formulas into reports, and creating numerous opportunities for human error. Worse still, manually moving data across documents makes it difficult to identify those errors later, and also opens users to the risk of data duplication or deletion.

Too Many Tools

While paper-based record-keeping can pose problems, loading up on too many software tools can create a situation that is just as painful from a reporting perspective.

"One of the difficulties with diving into the digital world is that you end up having an app for this, and then an app for that, and then an app for that,” points out Adam McKnight, Data Analyst for Halifax Water’s Water Quality Programs.

Digital transformation should be an important goal for every large wastewater utility, but spreading data across too many dedicated apps can make data management a time-consuming and frustrating experience.

Adopting Tools That Actually Work

While spreadsheets are currently the tool of choice at many wastewater utilities for managing, storing and analyzing compliance data, utilities will have to move past them if they’re to make any progress towards full compliance.

In a recent issue of AWWA Journal, Philadelphia Water Department environmental engineer Tyler C. Bradley points out how over-reliance on spreadsheets can contribute to “human error, lack of reproducibility, and lack of version control. While it is possible to overcome these by using a well-organized worksheet, the work is subject to these errors whenever a different user makes changes.”

The collaborative, cross-functional nature of work at wastewater utilities and the sheer volume of data they’re collecting means that we’ll need new tools that avoid these pitfalls and help users:

Automate Repetitive (and Easy-to-Automate) Tasks

The more repetitive the work, the more important it should be for a wastewater utility to automate it using procured or self-build data management software. Doing so can save administrators hours of busywork and cut down on the probability of human error.

Generate Reports

Compliance reporting and analysis often involves performing calculations on raw data, and doing so manually via spreadsheet can make it difficult for other users to review that work for errors. Entrusting this work to software that generates reports automatically can remove a significant amount of risk from this process.

Eliminate Application Overlap

When possible, utilities should prioritize software that integrates sampling, operations, research and other data and eliminates the need to context switch, learn new tools and create potentially overlapping datasets.

Outflows from LA Sanitation’s Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant 1-Mile Outfall (Photo credit: Google Earth)

2. Use Data to Move From Reactive to Proactive Problem Solving

While NPDES reporting violations are a problem, they’re not the only source of significant noncompliance at wastewater utilities.

Even if better data management practices can make submitting DMRs a less painful process, effluent limit exceedances and compliance schedule violations will continue to be a serious problem, leading to operational headaches, EPA fines and poorer public and environmental health outcomes.

When implementing technologies that make it easier to report compliance and violations, it pays to consider how those same technologies can help wastewater utilities avoid violations in the first place—specifically by transforming wastewater problem-solving from a reactive process to a data-driven, proactive one. Specific ways that wastewater utilities can do this include:

Improving Remote Monitoring Capabilities

COVID-19 lockdowns across the country drove home the reality that the future of work is distributed and that the ability to access our work remotely is key to resilience.

Thankfully the water industry is already ahead of the curve in this respect: many utilities already manage thousands of infrastructure assets remotely using sensors, controllers and transmitters. Building on that success and bringing remote monitoring data into a single, easily accessible system can help utilities:

Cut down on travel and site visits
Implement more accurate notification and alert systems
Shorten response times
Scale new operations quickly
Respond to unexpected staffing shortages

Increasing Access to Real-Time Data

Being able to monitor water quality, energy consumption, pressure levels and myriad other data points in real time also gives operators, engineers and compliance workers the opportunity to spot and address new trends before they become problems. Making sure those real-time figures are accessible via user-friendly console or dashboard will be increasingly important as wastewater utilities consolidate and build out their data management systems.

Adopting Tools That Make It Easier to Share and Collaborate

Wastewater utilities don’t need algorithms and complex math to use data to tackle compliance challenges. In many cases, finding ways to make sure data is available to the right people at the right time can be just as important.

That’s why tools that create opportunities for communication and data sharing between compliance, operations, engineering and all other business units within a wastewater utility are also crucial. For larger organizations, that often means centralizing data in a universal, easy-to-access system that provides a single source of truth.

3. Aim Beyond Compliance

Wastewater treatment facilities aren’t always perfectly designed, and the world outside of them is subject to constant change. Trends that could impact the ability of wastewater facilities to stay compliant and successful include:

Urbanization and other fluctuations in population and flow
Shifts in the needs of local industry
The emergence of newly-regulated contaminants like PFAS
Changing regulations and permit requirements
Maintenance, design and equipment challenges
Increasing budgetary constraints

Although it’s hard to beat compliance when it comes to north stars for wastewater utilities, if organizations are to truly succeed in an increasingly unpredictable future, they’ll have to build systems that account for the unexpected, build resilience and move beyond compliance as the sole goal.

Turn Data Graveyards Into Data Mines

The amount of data generated by wastewater treatment plants has increased exponentially over the last few decades.

One 2014 study found that a single large wastewater treatment plant (0.8-3 million population served) can generate upwards of 30,000 data points, encompassing everything from sampling data to GPS coordinates, call logs, field notes and more.

“Plant operators have an overwhelming stream of data at their hands, which is very difficult to process and analyze in a timely enough fashion to allow for better understanding or proper decision-making,” writes Lluís Corominas, a researcher at the Catalan Institute for Water Research.

To better understand and predict noncompliance in our wastewater treatment systems, we’ll have to move from seeing these vast databases as a liability—or as Corominas puts it, “data graveyards”—to a valuable asset that can be mined for actionable knowledge.

Leverage Machine Learning and Other Data Science Techniques

One benefit of adopting the data management practices and tools discussed earlier is that they open the door to more sophisticated forms of monitoring and analysis that ultimately allow utilities to do more with what data that they already have.

Machine learning methods that determine patterns within large datasets are one such technique that is already showing promise in the urban water sector.

A recent pilot of machine learning tools for predictive control and advanced analytics at Singapore’s Ulu Pandan Water Reclamation Plant helped operators achieve a 15% reduction in aeration energy usage compared to conventional techniques.
Similar techniques have recently been used to analyse wastewater data to determine the scale of local COVID-19 outbreaks in China and Canada.
In 2018, researchers from Stanford also demonstrated how machine learning techniques could be used to double the number of Clean Water Act violations detected without increasing the number of inspections.

While many of these tools are still in their infancy, there’s no question that there are valuable insights to be gained from wastewater data, and that the sooner utilities can store, organize and centralize this data, the better.

How Klir Can Help

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

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Case Studies

How Klir Helped SCV Water Navigate Amalgamation

min read

Case Studies

“I don’t think there is anything out there like Klir.”—Keith Abercrombie, Chief Operating Officer, Santa Clarita Valley Water

At A Glance

As SCV Water amalgamated three water divisions under one agency, Klir supported a seamless operational transition by organizing over 150 permits into a single collaborative dashboard.
Complete visibility for management into live status of all permits has eliminated all risk associated with specific employees holding permitting information.
With permitting tasks fully managed through Klir, no deadlines are missed.

The Challenge

In 2018, Santa Clarita Valley Water (SCV Water) was managing a massive organizational shift—amalgamating three separate water divisions into one.Among the many hurdles that Chief Operating Officer Keith Abercrombie and his team were facing: the complex task of understanding which permits were being maintained across the three divisions.With an aging workforce (80% of which is over 50) and a few key team members set to retire in the coming years, Keith and his team were driven to look for a new way to handle their permits.In the old system, everyone knew who was responsible for managing a specific permit, but a change in the overall structure meant a change in responsibilities for many employees.Each permit had requirements to fulfill for a key regulatory body, and not reporting or complying would mean that the utility could be subject to a fine or penalty—which in many cases could be quite material.Without the support of a central permitting database, and with the recent increase in permit quantity and complexity, there was simply too much risk.

The Solution

Keith and the team at SCV Water turned to Klir to pull together and help coordinate permitting information for the newly-amalgamated team.

The Klir permit management solution takes the risk of managing and complying with permits out of the individual’s hands by centralizing this information andautomating the tasks and activities needed to comply across the organization.“Klir has helped us manage and track permits and to be in a position that we are comfortable in knowing exactly what we are doing with our permits. We are not at the risk of screw ups, which can be embarrassing and costly,” says Keith.With permits across the organization now managed in Klir:

Contributors can easily keep track of deadlines and activities with automatic triggers and alerts
All data and requirements for 150+ permits are gathered into one permit management system
Employees can continue to work the exact same way as before because the Klir system builds onto existing systems and processes

“Some staff, like supervisors, worry that they could miss a deadline. Having the ability for software to tee up the events in advance, and not just for the person whose responsibility it is, but for someone else in case they are out, gives us peace of mind,” says Abercrombie.

The Impact

With a single source of truth for all permits, SCV Water has:

Eliminated the risk of having a specific employee handle all permitting information. Now, permit management will remain consistent when people retire or new people join the team.
Automated all permit-related tasks with task scheduling and notifications sent to key employees.
Prioritized workflows thanks to easy visibility into work on-hand, so that no deadlines are missed.

“It is a lot more than automation, it is a central database and I now know where to go to find the data I need," says Abercrombie.

How Klir can help

Klir is a single, unified operating system for water, pulling every aspect of wastewater management—including compliance, sampling and more—into an easy to use dashboard.Learn moreabout how Klir can cut down on administration and recordkeeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide a level of system-wide visibility unmatched by other water data management systems.

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Case Studies

How Klir Helps the Southern Nevada Water Authority Take its Compliance Position to the Next Level

min read

Case Studies

Serving Southern Nevada and the world famous Las Vegas strip, the Southern Nevada Water Authority provides potable water to 2.3 million residents and 40 million annual tourists.

With a mandate to be the world’s most efficient drinking water utility, the SNWA relies on Klir to be more proactive and efficient when it comes to permit and Safe Drinking Water Act compliance.

“Being in compliance is extremely important. But being able to demonstrate that in an effective and efficient way is where this tool really takes our compliance perspective to the next level,” says Dave Johnson, Deputy General Manager of Operations at the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Las Vegas Valley Water District. “The Klir application helps us to sleep better at night knowing that we can demonstrate that compliance.”

The Challenge

As a public utility, the SNWA has no room for error when it comes to permit compliance and utility operations.

With thousands of permits spread across the organization in different departments and different divisions, and 300,000 samples required annually to comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), the SNWA set out to identify a technology that would allow it to bring all of its permit tracking and sampling monitoring together into one location.

“We have a big responsibility to the community, and that is to ensure a safe and secure drinking water system. Klir provides us a tool to make sure that our water is safe and secure,” says Frank Milligan, Director, Environmental Health & Safety & Corporate Security at the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Las Vegas Valley Water District.

The Solution

Klir provides peace of mind for management with complete visibility into the utility’s live status of compliance.
Centralizing 1000+ regulatory permits into a single dashboard eliminates information silos.
SNWA analyzes over 300,000 water quality samples every year. Klir provides a tool to track and manage that sampling data, allowing the SNWA to ensure its in compliance and meeting ratepayers’ expectations each day.
With time saved on compliance admin, staff time can be redirected towards high-value proactive work.

The Impact

The Klir drinking water management platform allows SNWA to consolidate and manage all of its 1000+ permits and 300,000+ water samples in one place.

With a single software system to consolidate all of its permits and Safe Drinking Water Act sampling outcomes, the SNWA can deliver compliance more efficiently.
Management has complete visibility into the organization’s real-time compliance position, all within a single dashboard.
Permits are kept current and legal with no deadlines missed.
Staff time that would otherwise be spent on administrative tasks can be redirected to high value work such as conducting inspections, or hazard abatement action.

“The real value proposition in the Klir software is that it allows us to become much more efficient in how we deal with these massive amounts of data.” Dave Johnson
—Deputy General Manager of Operations, SNWA and LVVWD

How Klir Can Help

Klir is a single, unified operating system for water, pulling every aspect of water management—including compliance, sampling, permitting and more—into an easy to use dashboard.

Learn more about how Klir can cut down on administration and record-keeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide system-wide visibility into your water system.

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Guides

Drinking From a Firehose: Stop Fighting Fires and Make Real Progress on Your Utility’s IT Strategy

min read

Guides

You have dozens of unanswered calls on your phone, and your desktop is overflowing with support tickets. Your GM needs your help recovering files from their laptop, and you aren’t even an hour into your workday. Forget about an IT strategy—you're just focused on staying afloat. Sound familiar?When you’re an IT professional at a large water or wastewater utility, staying on top of day to day tasks can feel like a challenge. If you aren’t attending to a deluge of support requests or fighting fires, you’re worried about keeping legacy systems online or attending to a backlog of security updates. Instead of preparing for the future, you’re just worried about staying afloat.Rather than let this tidal wave wear you down, we’ve developed a few strategies to help you stem the flow, give your team room to breathe, and implement practices that deliver exceptional service in the long run.

1. Make Self-Service Support as Easy as Possible

Few things are as frustrating for an IT team as having to field the same question over and over again. It gets in the way of more important work, and if you aren’t careful it can make the rest of your organization unreasonably dependent on IT to solve non-technical issues.That’s why one of the quickest ways to stem the flow of repetitive support tickets is to anticipate them with a great internal FAQ, wiki or central knowledge repository—basically somewhere you can direct users who have questions you’ve answered many times before.Building out one of these resources can have implications that reach beyond IT. In fact, the average employee spends about 9.3 hours a week poring over email threads and other communications searching for internal company information they need to do their jobs.In addition to cutting down on support tickets, an IT knowledge repository can play a crucial role in onboarding and make your organization more friendly to new users in general, create discipline around which tools your organization uses, and also offers you the opportunity to proactively communicate a digital strategy to the rest of the organization in the form of a digital playbook.

2. Get the Rest of Your Organization Involved in Your IT Strategy

Another great way to anticipate and fix problems earlier is to involve team members more closely in your IT strategy by establishing a committee or council composed of directors across the different departments in your organization.Getting managers to flag and discuss broader IT problems in this way won’t just cut down on support tickets. It also lets you offload some of the burden of implementing your digital strategy, gets everyone on the same page when it comes to tools, and will make staff in general feel more invested in your IT strategy in general.Involving people in your IT strategy this way also helps you avoid so-called custom “shadow IT” initiatives pursued by impatient managers. These can be terrible for IT workflow: they introduce tools and systems that the rest of the organization is unfamiliar with, emboldens other departments to do the same, and could bring your organization to a grinding halt if the manager responsible ever goes on vacation.

3. Choose Low-Maintenance Tools

When procuring new software, keep an eye out for tools that empower your users to be self-sufficient, rather than having to depend on you or an external consultant for instruction.

Use Cloud-Based Tools by Default

A great way to do this is to default to cloud-based tools, which require less time to set up, don’t have a backend for you to worry about, and are often designed to be more intuitive and customer-facing.

Talk to Your Users

Are there any tools or software that staff at your company already use privately, or have experience using at other jobs? If so, implementing them officially could be a great way to save onboarding time and make your users even more self-sufficient.

Explore ‘No Code’ Solutions

Another way to make the software your organization uses more friendly to team members is to leverage so-called ‘no code’ solutions, which offer non-technical team members the chance to understand and even contribute to your team’s technical processes and systems.

Update Your Legacy Systems

If your organization depends on outdated, clunky legacy systems, they’re probably depending on you to put out the fires that those systems cause as well.

If there’s a system or software that takes up a particularly large chunk of your time, consider flagging it with management. Make sure to consider and communicate the resources you might save by replacing it with a more contemporary solution.

4. Automate, Where Reasonable

Automate as many of the mundane tasks involved in your day-to-day work as possible. Once you’ve implemented an FAQ or internal wiki, for example, try complementing it with a support chatbot that can answer basic support questions. If you rely on email or direct messaging to process support tickets, consider implementing a system purpose-built to handle support tickets for IT like Zendesk.

5. Consolidate, and Work With Vendors Who Support Multiple Functions

Another pain point that IT operators at utilities face is the excessively complicated tangle of software solutions they're currently expected to support.To this end, application consolidation is key when it comes time to start overhauling and procuring new systems.As much as you can, avoid overlap and redundancy in your systems by picking vendors that support multiple functions, rather than just one.Take Klir, for example. To complement your procurement process, Klir offers modules to manage permitting, sampling, inspections and more. These modules are available à la carte, or can be combined as a complete water management system.Klir doesn’t just enable utilities to remediate environmental and human health risks quickly: it also helps managers decide where and when to invest and surfaces opportunities for efficiencies that are difficult to see with spreadsheets or more opaque systems.

How Klir can help

Klir is a single, unified operating system for water, pulling every aspect of water management into an easy to use dashboard. Learn moreabout how Klir can cut down on administration and recordkeeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide a level of system-wide visibility unmatched by other water data management systems.

What’s a Rich Text element?

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Guides

Spreadsheets vs. Software: The 4 Biggest Risks of Using Excel for Utilities

min read

Guides

Until a few years ago, no single piece of software brought together all of the information and functions crucial to running a water and wastewater utility.

Clunky legacy solutions often fell short or left gaps. Operators had to make due with haphazard, improvised solutions instead like:

‍Manual SCADA Exports
Post-it Notes
Desk Drawers Stuffed with Documents
Spreadsheets That Don’t Sync Up

But as more of our work moves online and low-cost digital tools have become widely available, the excuses for managing mission-critical information in this way are quickly running out.

Modern cloud-based software like Klir is making it easier than ever to capture what happens in our organizations faster, more reliably, and more safely than spreadsheets. All within a single, easy to use, dedicated platform.

As more water utility operators engage in digital transformation projects, it pays to ask the question: what exactly are we missing out on by sticking to our spreadsheets?

1. Hemorrhaging Critical Information and Losing Work

Spreadsheets are a leaky medium in general: when we start relying on them to organize critical processes or store large amounts of data, some of it inevitably gets lost.

‍Permitting is a common example of this. Many larger utilities often find themselves having to manage, catalogue, and maintain thousands of permits at a time. But when that documentation lives in dozens of different spreadsheets scattered across dozens of different computers, permitting data often gets duplicated, overwritten, misplaced, or lost entirely. That's because spreadsheets:

‍Often rely on memory, specifically the memory of the person who initially created, formatted, named, and stored the spreadsheet.‍
Become increasingly unstandardized as team members come up with their own private ways of storing information in them.‍
Don’t automatically sync leaving documentation prone to confusing duplication, errors, and accidental deletion.
Force team members into an opaque environment defined by information silos, rather than a single source of truth.

As the water industry confronts the ‘silver tsunami,’ the pressure for utilities to come up with a less leaky system for managing permitting and other kinds of mission-critical information is only increasing.

2. Losing Time on Repetitive Tasks

Spreadsheets tend to be popular with smaller or new organizations because they appear, at least initially, to take less time to set up than a dedicated information management system.

But the irony is that as the amount of information we store in them increases, spreadsheets take more time to maintain, not less. That's because spreadsheets:

Don’t automatically populate, forcing employees to spend more time on data entry, pulling them away from more important tasks.
Are difficult or impossible to integrate with other systems, such as scheduling software, email, GIS, SCADA, LIMS—and even other spreadsheets.
Aren’t custom built for water. As the complexity and variety of tasks in our spreadsheets increases, the more work they take to set up and maintain.

3. Creating Data Hesitancy

Another symptom of spreadsheet reliance is that your staff is never fully confident in their information. That's because spreadsheets:

‍Live offline, decreasing accessibility and transparency.
Belong to different owners, increasing the risk of duplication and redundancy.
Have no restrictions around version control, making mistakes hard to flag or trace back to their source.
Usually contain out-of-date data, as they lack real-time capabilities.

4. Contain out-of-Date Data, as They Lack Real-Time Capabilities

In addition to being unreliable, spreadsheets simply aren’t as secure as the purpose-built tools that water operators have at their disposal today.

Whether you’re sharing spreadsheets over email or constantly swapping Excel files using local drives, spreadsheets create an information ecosystem that is difficult to secure, leaving your data vulnerable.

Why Does Software Beat Spreadsheets Every Time?

Enter modern cloud-based water operating systems (OS) like Klir. We fix these problems by providing a secure, centralized repository for critical reporting data and information crucial to plant operations.

By liberating information from spreadsheets and managing it this way, water utilities can:

1. Cut Down on Data Loss and Ambiguity

Dedicated platforms create a central, secure, and reliable collection point for all of your information, enabling you to:

‍Simplify reporting and cataloguing, reducing the risk of duplicate or lost information. ‍
Reduce risk of regulatory violations by processing data in real time and creating a reliable source for compliance information. ‍
Liberate and preserve institutional knowledge by putting all of the utility’s critical assets in one easy to access location.

2. Save Time Through Automation

Software like Klir is built for tasks like permitting and sampling, making it easier to automate data collection and analysis, enabling users to:

‍Automatically track and update tasks and targets in real time.‍
Generate actionable reports with minimal effort.
Rely on built-in failsafes that protect and ensure the integrity of your assets.

3. Enable Collaborative, Confident Asset Building

Unlike spreadsheets, dedicated software platforms enable collaboration and information exchange in real time, creating an environment that encourages staff to build and take care of information assets, rather than making it a chore.

Solutions like Klir allow water operators to build and share a single source of truth with their colleagues, removing the possibility of ambiguity and duplicates and giving operators confidence in their data.

4. Better Accommodate Growth and Find New Efficiencies

Using spreadsheets is a bit like looking at your organization through a keyhole. Centralizing and cataloguing your information using a dedicated platform, on the other hand, is like zooming out to get the full picture.

Aggregating information this way and looking at it through intuitive analytics tools opens up an entirely new world of possibilities for plant operators.

For the first time, you can see where trends intersect to identify cause/effect relationships and gain efficiency by identifying overlap in your internal processes. And as the amount of information your organization generates grows, those insights will only grow stronger.

The Bottom Line

Although spreadsheets are a lightweight, easy to use starting point, they quickly become a breeding ground for errors and data loss as demands grow. The time we spend maintaining them increases, and reporting confidence decreases.

Frustrated with spreadsheets? It’s time to start managing your operations data in a sustainable way that is built for the long term.

Klir is a dedicated platform that gives your team complete confidence that you’re compliant today, so you can plan for tomorrow.

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

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Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

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What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

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Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

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What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

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What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Software Comparisons

Klir vs. WaterTrax: Picking a Water Management Tool

min read

Software Comparisons

Municipalities and utilities have turned to electronic reporting tools (ERTs) to streamline, consolidate and automate their water and wastewater data processes for decades.

These tools cut down on lost or duplicate data, provide users with automated alerts, and generally make sampling a much less painful and time-consuming process.

At the same time, water managers know that sampling is just one part of the equation.

No part of a successful water management operation can function in isolation from another—but that’s also precisely what happens when utilities need a different application to manage each aspect of the water process, whether it be water quality or effluent monitoring, permitting, or inspections.

Adopting a truly unified approach to water management might be the only way that municipalities and utilities can protect themselves from another problem: too many tools.

To illustrate how, we’re going to compare two different water sampling solutions today:

Klir

An all-in-one cloud-based water management platform—and more specifically Klir’s sampling capabilities, which delivering fast and up to date sampling and water quality results to decision makers at water and wastewater utilities.

WaterTrax

An electronic reporting tool provided by Aquatic Informatics.

Klir Water Management Software: A Quick Intro

Until recently, the information that operators and managers at water utilities needed to do their jobs was fragmented, dispersed across numerous systems, incomplete, or otherwise difficult to access.

Launched in 2018, Klir is the first system to bring these disparate functions together into one complete SaaS based software suite.

Klir's Drinking Water Management platform allows water quality teams to manage monitoring plans and sampling outcomes against relevant legislation and regulations such as the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). Meanwhile, Klir's Wastewater Management Platform allows treatment plant operators to manage effluent reporting and DMR reports, so they can stay compliant with key regulation such as NPDES (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System).

This allows operators to

See trends across the entire water system—from sampling, to permitting, inspections & more—and make decisions with clarity and confidence.
Automate manual tasks and data analysis that were once tracked in Excel or Outlook, from scheduling sampling runs, to interpreting sampling results, to generating regulatory reports, eliminating 1+ days of admin work each week.
Have peace of mind knowing that Klir’s automatic alerts for MCLs, operational limits, and numerous other types of limits will trigger in case anything ever goes wrong, and feel confident that every sample has been completed on time.

WaterTrax: A Brief Overview

WaterTrax was first launched in 2002 with the goal of helping utilities and municipalities detect adverse water quality events earlier and faster, offering quick access to current and historical data, automatic alerts, and a consolidated repository for lab data, all in a web-based system that didn’t require and special hardware or software to run.

Today WaterTrax’s focus is water and wastewater management, and the typical user will use the tool to do three things: set up a sampling schedule, set up their water infrastructure, and begin consuming data from labs and field samples.

In 2017, WaterTrax was acquired by Vancouver’s Aquatic Informatics company, where it exists alongside a family of applications purpose-built for different aspects of the water management process, including:

Aquarius Samples, an environmental lab and field sample data production tool.
Linko, an Industrial Pretreatment and FOG solution.
Tokay, a backflow prevention and cross-connection control tool.

One Platform vs. a Family of Separate Apps

While WaterTrax and the Klir sampling module might have a lot of overlap, the biggest difference between the two is Klir’s unified platform approach to water, as opposed to Aquatic Informatics’ à la carte approach.

While Klir users can move seamlessly from managing water and wastewater processes to other key processes such as permitting, inspections, asset management, and backflow or cross-connections, WaterTrax users are forced to switch to a different Aquatic Informatics application every time.

The Klir system unifies sampling and water monitoring alongside permitting, inspections, asset management, and backflow or cross-connections. This allows utilities to:

Break Down Silos

Reducing contradictory data, enabling constant information sharing across departments and teams, and reducing knowledge-loss during employee retirements or absences.

Spend Less time on Implementation

Klir allows utilities to train multiple teams on a single system and manage multiple process in one central software system.

Work With a Single Source of Truth

As your organization grows and its data needs increase, your ability to create and work from a single point of truth will become increasingly important.

The Klir Water Management Platform in Action

In addition to the benefits of Klir’s platform approach, there are also specific areas where Klir allows utilities to manage sampling and water quality outcomes with ease:

1. Powerful Monitoring Plans and Sample Scheduling

Klir unifies monitoring plans and sample scheduling across the utility, and making those functions available across working groups (whether it be compliance, water quality, operations, or treatment facilities).

Klir is a SaaS-based program that can be securely accessed on any device, anywhere, and is designed with an intuitive user interface so that any delegated user in your organization can set up their monitoring plan, select what they want to monitor against, track sampling outcomes against relevant parameters, and provision their plan with a set of recurring tasks.

2. Better Lab Data Processing

Klir currently provides users with numerous ways of entering data into the system, including:

Manual frontend data entry
Frontend data import through the import tool
SCADA import
SFTP file transfers
Sample results APIs (future)

Klir is also developing a sampling API that will expand even further on users’ ability to get data into the Klir system easily.

3. Powerful Customization and Automation Functions

With automatic alerts and notifications triggered by sampling processes, Klir allows operators to create custom rules for almost any process or parameter in their water data management system, making it a powerful automation tool.

Klir vs. WaterTrax: Feature-by-Feature

4. It’s Built for Maximum Accessibility

Unlike most legacy water systems, Klir focuses on providing a user-friendly, intuitive and accessible experience that is designed to be used by anyone within the utility, regardless of experience. Klir makes your systems more transparent, not less, making it the clear choice for readability and ease of use out of the box.

5. One Product, One Vision

Klir is unique among competing water management platforms which because it was built as a unified water management solution from the ground up.

This means Klir allows users to avoid the pitfalls commonly associated with legacy software suites—including duplicate data, overlapping processes, multiple licenses, uneven product development, and lack of cross-app integration—while ensuring that your team can be trained and brought onto a single, unified system.

6. Collaboration and Task Management Tools

Klir allows teams to manage all of their tasks in-app, offering an internal chat and reply functionality, user tagging, and commenting, turning the platform into a single channel for collaboration and project management across the organization.

Meanwhile, legacy water management systems often don’t include internal collaboration or communications tools, forcing teams to come up with their own off-platform solutions (usually email).

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Blog

Getting More out of Biosolids With Better Data

min read

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"We used to have a plant manager who would say he'd put it on a Triscuit and eat it. I don't know that I'd do that, but it certainly wouldn't harm you."

That’s what Ryan Cerrato, an employee at New York-based composting company WeCare Organics, told a Vice journalist about his company’s compost in a recent documentary.

WeCare makes compost from biosolids—human waste that has passed through sewage treatment—which it then sells to farmers, nurseries, and gardeners as high-quality fertilizer. While most American consumers might not know it, biosolids are becoming an increasingly important part of our water treatment and agricultural systems.

As wastewater utilities face growing pressures to find cost savings while also increasing environmental outcomes, improving the quality of biosolids is becoming more important than ever before.

So how exactly can treatment plant managers get more out of biosolids while spending less? It’s a question that might very well come down to data.

What are biosolids?

Biosolids are solid waste that have been treated and reclaimed from the water system.

About half of all biosolids produced in the U.S. today are recycled and used as fertilizer. But not all biosolids are recycled: of the roughly 4.75 million dry metric tons (dmt) the country produced in 2019, a little under half ended up incinerated, landfilled, or stored as waste. With the right treatment processes, all of that waste could be put to more beneficial uses.

That’s where the question of biosolids quality comes in.

What are Class A and Class B biosolids?

The EPA’s 40 CFR Part 503 is the guiding star for wastewater operators and other processors looking to gauge the quality of their biosolids. This framework breaks biosolids down into two classes:

Class A biosolids have been treated and tested for pathogens and deemed safe enough to use in agriculture, gardening, and landscaping. They’re the kind that companies like WeCare buy from utilities, process, and resell: good for the environment and crucial to creating a closed loop, zero-waste system.

Class B biosolids are any that don’t make Class A. They might be safe enough to use in some applications, but they also contain detectable pathogens and/or high concentrations of metals like arsenic, chromium, and mercury that might make them unsuitable for growing food or soil remediation.

While Class A biosolids are an asset, Class B are expensive to dispose of and transport, and might pose a health risk for people working with them. So getting that B grade up to an A is worth more than just extra credit.

How to test biosolids

Most wastewater treatment plant operators have their eye on three different kinds of data when they make decisions about what to do with biosolids:

Sampling results, which are conducted at various stages of the treatment process and analyze water and biosolids for pathogens, drugs, metals, and other contaminants.
Continuous monitoring data from certain pieces of plant equipment for variables like temperature and pressure.
End product data, like class (A/B), weight, water content, transportation and disposal cost, etc.

For decades, plant operators have relied on legacy infrastructure to monitor this data and make decisions in the biosolids treatment process. But modern cloud-based platforms are giving operators the ability to view and analyze this information, so they can spot trends and act sooner.

Systems like Klir merge real-time data from sources likesupervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and laboratory information management systems (LIMS) to reveal opportunities to improve the product quality while managing harmful contaminants from the outset.

The risks of lagging data in biosolids processing

Working in spreadsheets and SCADA systems can feel a bit like pulling teeth. They’re slow, opaque, unintuitive, and often few people at an organization have the ability to pull reports.

These delays mean that operators are often reviewing the data long after it was processed—sometimes a month later, and have little means of intervening in the biosolids treatment process until it’s too late.

These lagging data sources aren’t just an annoying time suck: they can also pose a genuine threat to your operation.

Those risks include:

Releasing contaminated biosolids

When there’s a lag between the time a sampling test is completed, and the time that an operator can manually query and interpret those results, there’s a lot that can be missed or go wrong, including the possibility that those solids leave the plant before the test results come back.

Those kinds of mistakes can be costly—nine agencies received hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines from the EPA in 2019 for approving contaminated biosolids.

Reporting and record-keeping errors

Using Excel to deal with ever-larger data sets opens you up to the possibility of data loss, which can cause major reporting problems.

Filing a false report, even by accident, carries a fine of up to $10,000 and up to 2 years in prison. Meanwhile, willful violations carry a criminal fine of $5,000 to $50,000 per day of violation and up to 3 years in prison.

Data access problems

Your organization’s data should belong to the organization. But if team members are constantly creating their own workarounds to address the limitations of legacy software and spreadsheets, that can create problems around data ownership, especially if one of those team members is absent or leaves the organization.

How real-time data analysis drives better biosolids

For treatment plant operators, intuitive platforms like Klir are making it easier to access and display vital data and make decisions quickly.

The result? Treatment plants save on transportation costs, while minimizing biosolid waste.

Here are the key ways that water & wastewater analytics software help drive better outcomes:

1. Reduce costs and improve product quality

Biosolids are heavy, and the more water a treatment plant can extract from them, (known as “cake dryness”) the lower their transportation costs. With real-time data analytics, plant operators can take the right actions to lower transportation costs and identify efficiencies that might otherwise be invisible.

Real time data lets you:

Proactively influence the product outcome with an end-to-end view of operations
Develop key insights into product grading
Perform ongoing weight vs. cost analysis
Set budgets to meet cost and quality goals

2. Better report design and data collection

Displaying data in a format that is easy to understand and ‘ready to go’ decreases the amount of time workers must spend processing and understanding their data while also encouraging and rewarding better data collection.

3. Stay in compliance and predict problems before they happen

Data analytics dashboards help operators and managers identify any failures or problems that might come up, cutting down on costly compliance errors.

Quicker and more up-to-date sampling results also mean that plant operators can focus on forecasting trends and anticipating problems rather than constantly working backwards to trace where a contaminant came from. The result? Treatment plant teams can:

Stay compliant with real-time quality monitoring
Receive automatic warnings when contaminants approach or exceed limits
Proactively triage issues and intervene before contaminated product leaves the facility

4. Increase efficiency

Automated data analysis frees plant managers from data detective work, and gives them new insights on how to continuously improve their processes, allowing them to:

Analyze sampling data in real time, no queries required
Spot problems before they happen
Ensure monthly and annual reports are always consistent
Perform reporting work in a fraction of the time

5. Break down data silos

Providing plant operators and employees with clear visuals and a holistic data view can help dismantle a culture of reactivity by de-siloing information. The result is a holistic picture of operations across the plant.

With transparent and interactive dashboards, managers and employees can:

‘Slice and dice' data to meet their business needs
Confidently depend on a single source of truth
Create an open forum for communication

6. Futureproofing

Wastewater organizations that move to cloud-based systems to manage data across their plants are in a better position to anticipate future changes to biosolids regulations and industry standards. That’s because they can easily add new reporting criteria and scheduling requirements, merge in new data sources, or add in new parameters to instantly spot troubling maximum contaminant levels (MCLs).

Improve your biosolids with Klir

Klir’s treatment plants module is designed to help wastewater treatment operators access real-time insights, so they can reduce the cost of managing biosolids and effluents while improving their environmental performance.

Interested in learning how Klir can help your facility improve its performance? Talk to one of our experts.

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

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What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

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Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

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Resources

5 Game-Changing Ways AI is Transforming Water Management

Using Better Data to Tackle the Industrial Pretreatment Challenge

Better, Faster, Safer: How New AI Tools Could Transform Water Management for the Better

Introducing Klir Comply with ChatGPT Integration on Microsoft Azure

What’s new?

Leaving Linko Behind: How the City of Tyler Streamlined Pretreatment with Klir

Less Stress, More Certainty: How North Charleston Modernized Pretreatment with Klir

Permitting Without the Panic – How Two Agencies Modernized Their Workflows

Macon Water Authority’s Compliance Makeover – From Paper to Precision

5 Game-Changing Ways AI is Transforming Water Management

Maximizing ROI: The Case for Cloud Over On-Prem

Never Miss a Thing

All Resources

Klir vs. Hach WIMS: Choosing a Water Data Management Platform That Makes Sense for You

Klir

Hach WIMS

Klir OS and the Klir Sampling Module: A Quick Intro

Work With Trends

Use Automation

Receive Alerts

Hach WIMS: A Quick Intro

Klir vs. Hach: Which One is Right for You?

Reasons to choose Klir​

1. It’s a Truly Comprehensive System

2. It’s Bulletproof

3. Maximum Accessibility

4. Built for Focused Collaboration and Task Management

5. Build Institutional Knowledge Instead of Individual Knowledge

Reasons Why You Might Choose Hach​

1. You Prefer a More Hands-On Approach to Analytics

2. You're Focused on LIMS Integration and Custom Analytics

How Klir Can Help

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Drinking Water Contaminants: How Water Utilities Are Keeping Us Safe

PFAS

Chlorine

Mercury

Pharmaceuticals

Herbicides

Pesticides

Klir is the all-in-one water regulation and compliance platform built by water experts, for water experts. See how Klir works, and how we can help your utility save time and money—all while keeping your water safer and more secure.

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Reasons to choose Klir

Reasons Why You Might Choose Hach

Klir is the all-in-one water regulation and compliance platform built by water experts, for water experts. See *how Klir works, and how we can help your utility save time and money—all while keeping your water safer and more secure.***

The Challenge