Antennae innovation installation is cause for celebration

In collaboration with Thames Water, we’ve overcome a common issue in UK access covers that will save countless man-hours of work for UK businesses and local authorities, as well as thousands of pounds of public money expenditure.

The common issue that’s been unavoidable in the UK until now is chamber sensory apparatus beneath access covers being blocked by the ductile iron covering them. Through close engagement with Thames Water and its suppliers, we’ve researched and produced a way of fitting an antenna into the ductile iron itself so that no more transmitting failures occur.

This saves countless hours of labour as beforehand the only way to recuperate the missing data was for workers to go to the site of the asset with poor signal transmission and take a manual reading. The antenna innovation has been rolled out successfully on several of our Thames Water 600x600 access covers with no issues.

Pete McWilliams, Thames Water Studies Team Project Manager, said: “Prior to installing the covers with the integral antennae, if a logger was unable to transmit the data, we would have to send our contractor to the site to manually download it. This involves working in the highway and setting up traffic management which causes disruption to pedestrians and motorists alike.  This new technology that we’ve developed as part of our longstanding partnership with Wrekin Products should negate this requirement completely.”

Dave Sanders, our head of technical sales who headed up this project, said: “We pride ourselves on being solutions providers and market innovators. Transmitting malfunctions are a headache for our partners, and so we naturally explored the issue and designed a solution that would not comprise the existing quality features our product contains.

“It was a leap of faith at first whether this would work, but once the concept was proven we were then on the right track to work with Thames Water and hone our idea so that it worked failure free and reliably. Thames water put us in touch with its chamber apparatus supplier Detectronic and after three access covers proved what we found had worked, we then supplied a further eight and are now looking to roll this innovation out further.

“The commitment to leading the market with new ideas is what sets Wrekin apart. This project demonstrates this perfectly and we’re pleased to have been of help.”

Transmitting data of this kind is important to know the water levels in the combined sewer overflows (CSO) as well as the frequency and duration of any spill events – for example when the CSO is discharging excess flows to the environment.