Wastewater Visibility News
Improving Effective Utility Management (EUM) Practices in Wastewater with Tank Visibility
May 28, 2025
Wastewater Visibility News
Budgeting for cleaning, maintenance of structures and equipment, and energy use are key for following Effective Utility Management practices. Seeing the location and quantity of sediment and debris in your structures can give you key insights into critical areas of your bottom line.
Contents
What is Effective Utility Management (EUM)?
The EPA, in partnership with multiple organizations, created an updated EUM guide in August 2024, aimed at providing insights into utility management that are in step with modern-day challenges.
There are many tools, guides, and long-form videos available at the EPA’s main EUM hub. Each of these resources offers tools and suggestions to help water and wastewater utilities enhance their efficiency, adopt a more forward-thinking and sustainable approach, and build resilience in a changing environmental landscape. There are even specialized guides for rural facilities developed with the aid of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Rural Utilities Service (RUS).
Effective utility management (EUM) practices are the foundation for building and sustaining the technical, managerial, and financial capacity of drinking water and wastewater systems. EUM includes nine other key management areas in addition to financial viability:
- Product quality
- Customer satisfaction
- Employee and leadership development
- Operational optimization
- Infrastructure stability
- Operational resiliency
- Community sustainability and economic development
- Water resource adequacy
- Stakeholder understanding and support
These 10 areas are interconnected. Making improvements in any one area often improves other areas as well.
Rural Community Assistance Partnership Financial Management for Small Utilities Guide page 36
Assessing your systems: a key part of EUM
Creating a sustainable future for utilities begins with understanding the requirements. Each guide, worksheet, and video is designed to help utilities develop practices that provide strong institutional knowledge of how utility systems are performing. This knowledge base of performance allows utility managers to identify problems before they become critical operations issues and to budget with greater certainty.
It is common for a wastewater utility to know the Loss of Capacity threshold for cleaning and maintenance in their tanks. It is less common to have a clear, reliable picture of the rate of accumulation throughout the tank. Typical assessment methods involve wastewater operators or cleaning assessors using poles at strategic locations to get a sense for loss of depth. But this method has flaws when trying to follow best EUM practices.
Take the example below:
The blue dots on the oxidation ditch image above represent areas where workers were able to safely probe for depth changes in an attempt to assess sediment accumulation in the structure. Notice the large areas of the tank where no assessment can be done through probing?
This measurement gap translates to unknowns when budgeting for maintenance and cleaning, even if the remaining probe locations produce useful data. The data gaps can result in an unrecognized need to clean wastewater infrastructure when the unprobed area is significantly contributing to loss of capacity. The tank or ditch that appears clean because probing yields incomplete data, can actually be increasing energy use costs, creating extra work for aerators or mixers.
Many types of wastewater structures have challenging access areas, and probing or similar methods of measurement may not always yield actionable data for budgeting. Unknowns in wastewater structure contents mean that assumptions and guesswork are required to answer key EUM budgetary questions regarding energy use, equipment wear and tear, and overall system performance.
Additionally, traditional methods of measurement may require that multiple workers spend an extended amount of time assessing a facility. Probing and similar methods also require time invested in training to ensure that measurements are consistent from worker to worker.
Working smarter not harder on EUM with SediVision®
The oxidation ditch seen above was assessed using SediVision® technology.
In this image (a false-color elevation projection over the satellite image of the tank), we see that the majority of the red area representing the highest volume of debris accumulation is also in the same area where probing could not be performed. The data to create this image was collected by a small team over the course of a day or so, using technology designed to map wastewater infrastructure and provide complete and reliable data quickly.
This image, combined with other data points generated during this utility’s SediVision assessment, establishes a more comprehensive picture of the health and performance of this oxidation ditch. It equipped the utility to make maintenance and budgeting decisions based on informed data.
The simplest way to look at it is: See sediment. Save money. With a complete picture of the sediment in this oxidation ditch in hand, the utility can more accurately plan and budget its maintenance and cleaning. The utility also gains an opportunity to request a budget for cleaning that they may have otherwise missed, since probing was not able to show the extent of the sediment in the tank.
SediVision’s methods for providing tank sediment data can also be applied year-over-year, providing a picture of the rate of accumulation, which is crucial for EUM forecasting practices. Another important application of SediVision technology is in post-storm infrastructure assessments to determine if hurricanes, floods, power outages, or other storm debris have altered your system’s performance capabilities.
Knowing what’s in your wastewater structures provides advantages in building a resilient, accurate budget. How could your utility’s EUM strategy benefit from SediVision?
More case studies on SediVision providing EUM insights for wastewater utilities:
- Are Your Wastewater Tanks Consuming Excess Energy Due to Sand and Grit? Emerging Technology Can Help You Find Out – Article from the March 2024 edition of Florida Water Resources Journal
- Read more case studies on SediVision.com
- Read more case studies on Wastewater Visibility News
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