The challenge
A large share of South Africa's wastewater treatment works are classified high-risk, and the consequence of an upset isn't just a compliance number — it's partially treated sewage reaching a river. The hard part is that a works drifts out of spec between the periodic samples that traditionally measure it: a tripped blower, a blocked pump, a dissolved-oxygen crash or a hydraulic overload can push final effluent out of limits long before anyone sees it on a lab result days later — and load shedding makes those upsets routine.
The core gap: a sample tells you what the effluent was when it was taken; it can't warn you that the process is failing right now. By the time the lab result returns, the non-compliant discharge has already happened.
Our approach
- Monitor what runs and protects the process. Inflow and hydraulic load, dissolved oxygen in the biological stage, pump and blower health and run-status, levels and overflow risk — integrating the instruments the works already has where possible.
- Watch the final effluent continuously. The licence parameters (pH, COD, turbidity and the rest) logged in real time, not sampled and forgotten (see our WWTW monitoring guide).
- Alarm to a named owner. A DO crash or blower trip reaches the responsible person immediately, with escalation — so the upset is corrected before it becomes a breach.
- Automate the compliance record. Continuous logging becomes the licence and DWS / Green Drop evidence — defensible and exportable.
- Survive load shedding. Edge buffering keeps the record continuous and alarms on power loss, on the addaNet platform.