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'Smartball' Helps Spot Water Wasting Leaks In California Drought

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – A new high-tech device makes sure water doesn't go to waste in this drought, by finding leaks in San Francisco's aging underground pipes.

There's water leaking on Pennsylvania Street. The equivalent of 5 swimming pools a day. Roxie the Pomeranian seemed to know about it a few days ago, before it got to the surface.

"She keeps walking a couple feet along the street and sniffing along that line and I couldn't figure out why she was doing, and it turns out there's been a leak," Wendy Watkins, Roxie's owner told KPIX 5.

That's a pretty low tech way of finding a leak before it bubbles up. There are, of course, better ways.

This system uses sensitive sensors to hear where water is rushing. It shouldn't be here. So there is a leak, and the city water department knows it has to patch it up.

Pipes leak underground for many reasons. Sometimes they're just old. A pipe recently taken out of service was put in the ground in 1893. Some city pipes were installed in the 1860s.

145 years later, a new device will be looking at them with the highest of high tech eyes. It's called the Smartball.

"It rolls through the pipe, and as it rolls by, it identifies and listens acoustically for leaks and air pockets," said Adam McKnight with PureTech.

San Francisco is the latest utility to rent this one-of-a-kind device. It finds small leaks underground before they are big ones, and ones that don't yet exist.

"We also use it to identify the failures of tomorrow, the conditions of the pipe where leaks will develop in the future," McKnight said.

It uses sound to save water. But, at $400,000, is it a sound investment?

"We think so. If once we proactively find one of these leaks, and repair it, not only are we saving millions of gallons of water, but we also are preventing a large main break which can cost $400,000 in one incident,"said Katie Miller of the San Francisco Water Department.

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