When Wayne’s Water World Went Digital…

Victorian British industrial history met state-of-the-art 21st Century digitilisation from SICK to deliver a surprising sensing solution high in the windy moors of West Yorkshire.

Wayne Morrison has a surprising sideline alongside his role advising industrial customers all over the North of England about their choice of SICK sensors: He helps to run a water company.

Wayne is one of a handful of community-minded volunteers that enable the historic Henshaw Water storage facility to continue to supply 165 properties in the village of Walsden, near Todmorden, with clean, clear and delicious-tasting water - collected from the hills right above their homes.

But climate change and increasing demand is putting the historic facility under stress. So, the SICK sales consultant enlisted his colleague Charlie Walker, the company’s UK digital product manager, to make sure a continuous water supply to residents could be maintained. The solution took not just 21st Century know-how, but plenty of 19th Century-style hands-on Northern hard graft.

Historic Water Facility

Nestled in the cradle of the industrial revolution, the cotton mills of Todmorden sprang up to take advantage of the River Calder where Lancashire borders Yorkshire. On the hill that rises steeply above Wayne’s house – one of a row of former co-operative managers’ cottages on Henshaw Road – a water storage tank known locally as “The Lodge” stores water collected via a network of perforated pipes from the marshy moorland at the top of the hill.

The Lodge is a stone-lined tank measuring 25 x 5 x 3 metres, constructed by industrialists in the late 19th Century to serve the local Co-operative and surrounding mills, and later to provide clean water for the managers and mill workers, too.

One of England’s largest private domestic water supplies, Henshaw Water is still run on the non-profit membership model that harks back to the area’s roots at the heart of the cooperative workers’ movement. The local Bridge End Co-operative took over the management of the supply in 1907 until responsibility was handed over to the community in 1964. For as long as anyone can remember, it has never run out of water … until

Water Stress

“The tank only has a capacity to supply the community for about 5 days, and even though there is plenty of rain in the area, it is coming under increased stress,” explains Wayne. “In the late Spring of 2022, we came close to running out of water for the first time. The area’s public water utility Yorkshire Water had to step in to install a temporary pipe spur so that the local houses did not run dry.

“At Henshaw Water, everything is managed, operated and paid for by the members. Volunteers manage the day-to-day maintenance of the supply, communication with customers and look after the finances. So, it was going to be down to us to find a solution to the problem.”

Yorkshire Water installed a permanent connection with a one-way valve that can be activated in the event of a shortage of supply. It was completed just in time to see it needed in the hot, dry days of June 2022. But how could the volunteers predict when the level of the tank would drop too low, so the emergency supply could be enabled?

Once the Yorkshire Water connection was completed, the tank levels would need to be monitored continuously. Fortunately, having worked for SICK for 20 years, Wayne knew a thing or two, not just about sensors, but also about the potential to collect digital data outputs which could help the volunteers monitor and interpret the water levels remotely.

“This was going to be no ordinary project like the factory automation systems that I am used to. There is no power or Wi-Fi half a kilometre up a Yorkshire moor!”, he adds.

Digital Solution

Charlie and Wayne installed a SICK CFP level sensor in the tank, and SICK FTS flow meters to monitor the flow on the outlet pipe to the village. Water from the tank is gravity fed down the 0.5km pipe to a treatment plant on Henshaw Road.

Charlie installed a digital sensor solution to provide additional data and help the volunteers to manage the water facility. A SICK Telematic Data Collector acts as a controller for the system in a specially-constructed control unit on top of the tank, powered by a solar panel. It also transmits data to the Cloud via an MQTT broker provided through the HiveMQ IoT platform. The control unit is housed in an enclosure suitable for the inclement environment, protected by an internal heater to prevent instrument failure.

Wayne and Charlie were grateful for the help of Lee Baldwin from West Yorkshire firm PL Controls, who were appointed to build the control cabinet at their premises in Halifax.

Wayne and Charlie also needed to install a wind turbine to provide sufficient power for the system. “We had to transport a tonne of concrete in a precarious journey by pick-up truck up the steep hill, before laying the base by hand. It certainly gave us some idea of how hard it must have been for those pioneers to install the tank one hundred years ago.“

The solar and wind power generation has a combined capacity to pull up to 3 amps and 150m of cabling also had to be installed.

“The system uses SICK Dynamic Data Displays to monitor information, including the temperature of the water, temperature of the sensor, signal quality, sensor heartbeat data, as well as the level,” Charlie explains

“Data collected from the SICK FTS flow meters can also be used with the level measurement to calculate any water loss in the system. None of this additional data would be available without a digital system, or even just installing a single sensor with an on-device display.”

Thanks to a continuous monitoring solution, and a true collaborative effort, a 19th Century facility is truly future-proofed to continue supplying water well into the 21st Century, and beyond!