This is the continuation of what Ross and Heather were discussing in the previous post “How to Number and Replace Water Utility Infrastructure.”
How do you replace bigger blocks of pipe?
And that comes down to the asset management practices of your own utility.
Some people will replace very short lengths of pipe. In this case, you might want to track that change.
Other authorities said, hey look, if we’re going to replace, we actually do the whole street. We don’t come with a big crew and only do 10 feet or 20 feet of pipe.
It’s just once we’ve mobilized and got on site, and we’ve got really old pipe there, we do a hundred feet or 300 feet, whatever figure is.
So it’s really, I think, how you number your pipe sits around how your maintenance and replacement practices work.
Coming back to that idea of keeping it simple, the more elements that you introduce into your inventory of small pieces of pipe.
So if you’ve got little 3-feet pieces of pipe in your inventory you’ll be tracking, how does the person on the field going to assign the work on the right asset at that short length?
So you have just got to think your way through those. The risk you run if you have lots and lots of small pieces of pipes is that you’re introducing complexity that you can’t manage in terms of your inventory and also your field reporting.
If you are going to do that, then it comes back to that same question if you are using a spatial system, you would break those up in your GIS and then GIS assigns a number to each individual element of the GIS – each pipe element or line or point element that it has. So you can just grab that number and assign that.
If you want an alphanumeric or an intelligent numbering system, then you got choices around effectively the name of the road and or the chainage or the mileage along the road is often the way that you that.
It just again comes back to how your infrastructure management practices are.
And maybe you might have a different a “V” for a valve and an “H” for a hydrant or something like that as an ending descriptor or “P” for a pipe.
So those are sort of the two ways you can do that in.
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