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How can I report the pressure or other results at Customer Meter elements?
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. To help prevent reduced performance (longer load times), these results are not computed by default. 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.
For large models with a lot of customer elements, this may result in more sluggish performance or a delay in calculation.
If you are using WaterGEMS/WaterCAD V8i SELECTseries6 or earlier, these are results are not included, as the customer meter element is mainly intended for input, not for results. This was done in order to keep the feature "light weight" considering that some models may have hundreds of thousands of customer elements (or more). Adding the ability to save results could potentially have a large impact on model performance, especially for such users with large numbers of customer meters in their models.
One thing to note is that the customer element does not have an elevation field in older versions so you would not be able to get an exact pressure, though the elevation (and pressure) of the associated element is likely an accurate approximation. If the source file for the customer meters does have elevation data, you could import them as spot elevations, mapping the elevation field. You can then read the pressure from the spot elevation.
1) Set up an Excel spreadsheet with worksheets for junction and customer meter. Set up columns for label and pressure for the junction worksheet and label and Associated element for customer meter.
2) Set up a Modelbuilder connection to the spreadsheet, mapping the appropriate elements and fields, then perform a Sync-Out
3) In Excel, use vlookup in the customer meter worksheet to read the pressure of the junction worksheet, matching based on associated element. See attached example below.
4) Optional: create a User Data Extension for customer meters in the model and import the pressure using Modelbuilder
Customer Meter Pressure Lookup
1) Generate a pressure contour, right click it in the contour manager and choose to export to DXF
2) Create a child active topology alternative and assign it to a new child scenario
3) In the new child scenario, use Modelbuilder to import the customer meter source file file as junction, choosing to save a selection set
4) Use Terrain Extractor (Trex) with the DXF from step 1 and selection set from step 3, importing essentially an estimate of the pressure at the customer meter location into the junction's elevation field. The elevation field would then be interpreted as the pressure, considering the units used.
5) Hide the customer meter layer by unchecking the box next to it in Element Symbology, in order to see the junctions in the child scenario that contain the pressures.
An experienced programmer and member of the Bentley Developer Network could conceivably use the WaterObjects.NET API to program a tool that would report the pressure for customer meters. See more here:
Waterobjects.NET
Customer Meter Elements and the External Customer Meter Data Manager