Safe water and waste handling in Norrköping
Drinking water is our most important resource and guaranteeing fresh, clean water requires reliable systems. Norrköping has chosen a flexible and safe communication solution for the operation and monitoring of water and waste management.
Background
Along with the automation company Cactus Utilities, AddSecure has integrated a secure communication solution in the municipality’s operations system.
Norrköping Vatten och Avfall is responsible for households and businesses in Norrköping having access to clean drinking water and that wastewater is properly treated before it goes back into the environment. Facilities such as water towers, pump stations and treatment facilities have strict requirements for the technical solutions to secure the supply and guarantee quality. They require constant monitoring.
With this solution, things run smoothly, it is always connected and can be configured and monitored remotely.
Jonas Ekström, System Manager
The Solution
For the wireless connections, Norrköping Vatten has chosen one of AddSecure’s secure and simple IoT services as an integral part of the system from Cactus Utilities. The service’s advanced communication platform ensures that only authorised users can reach addressed devices and prevents all unauthorised access. Norrköping Vatten uses the service for its logs and PLCs. Among other things, logs are used for rain gauges, flowmeters, level indicators and pressure gauges. The service ensures that devices can communicate with the SCADA system securely.
“With this solution, things run smoothly, it is always connected and can be configured and monitored remotely. Our partnership with AddSecure works well and the support is excellent – all you need to do is call their technical support and they help you with whatever you need,” says Jonas Ekström, System Manager at Norrköping Vatten och Avfall.
The municipality is conducting ongoing work to move all communication for water services to 4G and optical fibre. Today, Norrköping Vatten has around 80 wireless connections and is aiming to upgrade an additional 100 services from using telephone lines to optical fibre or 4G. Norrköping Vatten has chosen to use either the city’s optical fibre network, which is a closed network, or 4G through AddSecure’s secure communication platform.
“There have been lots of false alarms with our outdated telephone lines and it’s expensive to make site inspections. AddSecure’s service gives us a good overview of our operations system and we are notified promptly if there are going to be disruptions to service for example, or other disturbances to our facilities. It’s an incredibly stable solution and we are very happy with it,” says Jonas Ekström.
Norrköping Vatten has a service agreement with Cactus Utilities which includes hardware, systems and secure communication all in one contract.
“We want to offer our customers a complete solution which combines our products with communication transmissions. AddSecure’s service ensures that no device loses contact with the system. The service has to be reliable because, if a transmitter or another component drops out.