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Customer meter elements provide a way for users to maintain customer water demand data within WaterGEMS and WaterCAD. It provides the user access to features such as element symbology and the ability to visualize customer location and assignment of demand to node elements.
The new customer meter element is represented by a house icon as pictured below and the association of the element with a node or pipe is shown as a dashed line.
The main steps for using the customer meter elements are entering demands for the element and assigning the customer metering element to a hydraulic model element, such as a junction. This is done by clicking on the drop down button in the “Associated Element” field from the properties grid or the FlexTable then choosing “Select Associated Element…”
Note: the "Zone" field will display the Zone of the customer meter's associated element.
The customer meter element can also be imported or updated from eternal data sources using ModelBuilder. More information can be found on ModelBuilder by this link: Building and updating a model using ModelBuilder
The external data source should contain a label, the x-y coordinate and demand data for the new element. If the data source is a shapefile, the spatial data is included already, so x-y coordinates are not needed.
Demands can be entered manually by entering values in the property grid, the customer meter FlexTable, and the Demand Alternative under the Customer Meter tab. Demands from a customer meter element must be assigned to the associated hydraulic modeling element in order to be used in the calculations. The demand control center is not used for the customer meter element because there can only be a single demand and unit demand for a customer meter.
LoadBuilder can be used to assign the customer meter element to the hydraulic modeling element using one of the allocation methods located within the “Customer Meter load data” in the first step of the LoadBuilder process. The different methods that can be chosen are, "Nearest node", "Nearest pipe", or “Customer Meter Aggregation”. The "Model Node Layer" will usually be set to ‘Junction\All Elements’, but it can also be any selection set of node elements that have “Demand (Base)” as a property. The "Customer Data" is usually set to Customer\All Elements although it can also be any selection set of customer meter elements. If the customers are being assigned based on nearest pipe method, in addition to specifying the Model Node Layer and Customer Data, the user must also specify the Model Pipe Data which identifies the pipes to be considered. This enables the user to use a selection set which can ignore large transmission mains with no customers.
Note:
- For more information on connecting customer meters to pipes with taps and laterals, see this article.
- When using Loadbuilder to assign customer meters to junctions, the user should update the existing Demand alternative rather than create a new one. If a new Demand alternative is created, the demand data imported through ModelBuilder will be lost.
Typically, customer meter elements are not directly used in hydraulic calculations so there are no hydraulic results for them. The user should find results in the node to which the customer element is associated. However, starting with the CONNECT Edition release of WaterGEMS and WaterCAD, results fields for hydraulic grade and pressure have been included for the customer meter element. If you want to include these results in the customer meter, open the Calculation Options and change the property "Calculate Customer Results?" to True. When you compute the model, you will see results for hydraulic grade at the current time step, as well as maximum and minimum results across the model run.
If you are using WaterGEMS/WaterCAD V8i SELECTseries 6 or earlier, hydraulic results will not be directly available.
A new External Customer Meter Data manager have been added so that external source data can be added to the Customer Meter element. This allows the user to see detailed information about the location that the Customer Meter element represents. Similar to ModelBuilder, the user can select from a number of source file types, such as database files and Excel files, and import the data into the External Customer Meter Data manager. This can be important in keeping track of demand information that will be applied to the Customer Meters.
For a free Webinar on using the Customer Element, click this link. If this link does not work, navigate to the main H&H Webinar directory and scroll down to the entry from Sep 2014 entitled "Improved hydraulic modeling of customers and their water demands"
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Using Customer Meter demands with Darwin Calibrator
Pressure and other results at Customer Meter elements