System assessments
Identify the cause. Fix what matters. Restore system performance.
When a complex water supply system fails, the cause is rarely obvious and the cost of getting the diagnosis wrong is high. Bursting pipes, reservoirs running dry and pump failures are symptoms. Finding what is behind them means looking at how the whole system behaves, not only at the component that failed most visibly.
We assess large-scale irrigation and water infrastructure that is underperforming or failing. Our work is to find the interactions between components that are causing the problem, then recommend the interventions that restore performance without replacing what does not need replacing.
What the assessment involves
Every assessment begins with how the system was designed to operate and how it is operating now. That gap is where most failure causes are found.
We analyse how the system behaves as a whole: pump capacities, pipe and canal sizing, reservoir volumes and the way all of them interact as conditions change through the season.
Complex systems rarely fail because one part is inadequate. They fail because parts that each look adequate are no longer matched to one another. Modelling those interactions is what shows where the system is breaking down, and why.
Drawings and operational records do not always give up the answer. When they do not, we put field pressure monitoring equipment on the system and measure what it does while it runs. That data is tested against the hydraulic model to pinpoint the components and conditions driving the failure.
Pressure surges, known as water hammer, are one of the most damaging failure modes and one of the most often misdiagnosed. A pump trip, a valve closing or a power failure changes flow velocity suddenly, and the surge that follows can burst pipes, wreck valves and destroy pump infrastructure.
We analyse the transient pressure behaviour of your system and recommend surge protection that removes the risk without oversizing everything downstream of it.
Every assessment ends with a prioritised set of recommendations. Each one is weighed for its effect on performance and its cost, so you can see which fixes recover the most for the least spend. Where a targeted intervention will restore performance, we will not recommend wholesale replacement.
You receive a technical report setting out the diagnosed cause, the recommended interventions, the performance improvement to expect and what implementation will cost. If you would like us to carry it further, we can take the recommended upgrades through detailed design and construction-ready documentation.
A diagnosis supported by a hydraulic model and field measurement. You stop paying to replace parts that were never the problem.
Every recommendation costed and ranked, so you can start with the one that recovers the most and plan the rest around your cash flow.
Surge behaviour analysed and designed out, which is the difference between one repair and the same repair every season.
We can take the recommendations through to construction-ready design, with nothing lost in the handover to whoever does the work.
Pietermaritzburg, 3201
+27 76 375 5043