Sectioning of supply water installations

The monitors of the DanTaet WLP-1 supply water leakage protection system are all equipped with a run-in facility that will adapt the monitor's alarm limits to the actual conditions present in the installation. Provided the high/low consumption phases have been reasonably estimated, this achieves optimum protection in the prevailing circumstances.

However, an unacceptably low degree of protecion can sometimes result when all monitor parameters are adversely influenced by the actual consumption pattern. This is often the case in installations that serve a large population of consumers. Alarm limits resulting from run-in in such installations will often appear unreasonably high, although they accurately reflect the consumption parameters observed in the run-in period. This phenomenon typically occurs in large apartment buildings, hotels and shopping malls.

To acheive better protection in such circumstances, the monitoring may be sectioned, i.e. divided into smaller branches each serving a lesser number of individuals - provided of course the pipe installation is suitably arranged to support this. DanTaet Supply Water Leakage Protection WLP-1 for commerce/industry supports simultaneous individual protection of four independent sections.

For leakage protection of large new construction buildings (i.e. having many individual consumers) it thus becomes important during the design phase to arrange the pipes of the supply water installation into suitable sections.

In shopping malls it may be beneficial to separate daytime consumers (shops) from nighttime comsumers (restaurants, night clubs, discotheques), and to isolate air humidifiers and possibly cleaning/hosing taps in separate branches.

In apartment buildings, the largest section should correspond to a staircase, i.e. each staircase should have its own warm water circulation loop. The principle of the more consumers served, the less the achievable degree of protection still holds. Therefore even per-staircase sectioning may be insufficient in very tall buildings and building with many flats per floor per staircase.