Case Studies

Hastings District Council are currently looking at the feasibility of installing a more reliable water supply for two seaside settlements and have enlisted WaterForce’s help.

Residents of Haumoana and Te Awanga ideally require a new bore and a nearby kiwifruit orchardist (who is an existing WaterForce client) already has one operating at a similar depth.

Tom Mead, Tim Ireland and Richard Koorey from our Hastings Branch were asked to arrange a seven day pump test of this 300mm diameter bore to help assess the water quality so the council can then make a decision about a permanent solution.

“We set up our verification flow rig to monitor the flow rate through an existing water meter,” Tom explains. “We needed to pump at a high flow rate for seven days and discharge it down a nearby drain. We had to check the site twice a day to make sure the water was still running away nicely down the drain and there was enough diesel in the pump to keep everything going.”

A second smaller (100mm) bore was also monitored using a data logger to see what impact the high flow rate would have on water levels in the surrounding area. Both bores were fitted with riser pipes for this purpose and a pressure transducer was dropped 20m down the main bore to help measure the drawdown.

“We hooked up a WaterCheck telemetry monitoring system to the water meter and the pressure transducer which logged data every two minutes and uploaded the information every 15 minutes so the data could be viewed remotely and in real time by ourselves and the consulting hydrologist,” Tom says. “The hydrologist could then pull that data onto an Excel spreadsheet for analysis.”

Alerts were also set up so any faults could be detected and fixed in a timely manner but in the end “everything ran very smoothly”.

WaterForce is now waiting to hear the outcome of the water quality test results and whether a new bore will be drilled. But Tom, Tim and Richard deserve a round of applause for having provided the best quality data so the right decision can be made.