PARMA HEIGHTS, Ohio — It looks like a typical lawn behind Cleveland Water's Parma Heights facility, but underneath this manicured lawn sits a model of a water utility's service system consisting of different kinds of pipes. If you wanted to identify whether an underground pipe here was
lead, copper or galvanized steel, your only option has been to start digging. That got the folks at the Cleveland Water Alliance thinking.
"We need a viable solution for identifying lead service lines under the street without having to dig them up, without having to excavate driveways, without having to disrupt service," said Emily Hamilton of the Cleveland Water Alliance. "And there was not a solution in place presently."
Those have been expensive options for water systems across the country, facing an Oct. 16, 2024, deadline from the EPA to submit an initial inventory of their lead service lines with a goal of having most of them replaced over the next ten years. So, the Cleveland Water Alliance, with the backing of some funds from the state, hosted two Open Innovation Challenges in an attempt to find an alternative to digging.
"We put out this challenge to innovators saying can you help us find a solution," said CWA's Samantha Martin. "And some of them have technology that might have been used for something else but they thought they could try it, like acoustic technology for this specific problem."
Acoustic technology, sound. A company was using it to find underground water leaks and expanded it to identify the types of pipes without digging.
Timothy Preager of Solinas Technologies says to think of it this way, "if you hold a copper pipe and you hit it against a wall, you're going to hear a ping kind of sound, and if you do similar with a lead pipe it's a lot heavier, it's a lot denser, it has very different acoustic properties and you hit that against the wall you're going to hear more of a thud sound. That's in essence what we're trying to detect through various aspects to the ground-born vibration."
They found they can go to your home, use curbside shutoff, and attach sensors to a key the water company typically uses to shut off your water that's connected to the pipe.
"We shake the pipe here," Preager said, demonstrating the process. "And then we measure through very, very sensitive accelerometers here at the top of the key and see how it responds in combination with various other ground sensors."
That combination of the sound and the sensors is fed into a computer, which can identify the different materials involved, lead pipe or not. It's still in the testing and fine-tuning stage, but Hamilton said, "We're hoping that these technologies hit the commercial market by the end of the year."
Resulting in savings that Solinas Technologies estimates will be 90 to 95 percent over digging. A local solution CWA's Samantha Martin points out to a global problem.
"We're working to solve the issue right here in Northeast Ohio, that is so, so much bigger than us."
