Discharging to the municipal sewer? You're billed on load — and judged on every spike.
If your factory sends effluent to the municipal sewer, you sit under a trade-effluent permit and the local bylaw, not just a DWS licence — and the two questions are money and risk. You're charged on volume and COD load, so an unmeasured bill is one you can't check. And a single pH excursion, COD shock or grease slug can breach the permit, choke the sewer, trigger penalties or even disconnection. addanode monitors your discharge continuously at the connection point — flow, pH, COD, conductivity, temperature and fats/oils/grease — so you prove compliance, verify what you're billed, and catch a shock load before it leaves site.
Discharge to sewer is a different regime to discharge to a river.
Trade effluent → municipal sewer
Governed by the local authority's industrial-effluent bylaw and your trade-effluent permit. You're billed by the municipality on discharge volume and COD load, and held to limits on pH, COD, conductivity, temperature, fats/oils/grease, settleable solids and specific substances — to protect the sewer and the works downstream.
Effluent → environment / river
Governed by the National Water Act and your DWS water-use licence, with final-effluent limits set to protect the receiving water. That's the regime our water quality & DWS compliance page covers.
Many sites are under both — process effluent to sewer under a trade-effluent permit, plus stormwater or another stream to the environment under a DWS licence. The same addaNet platform handles both, so each discharge point is measured against the right set of limits.
At the point your effluent enters the sewer.
pH
The fastest-moving and most-breached parameter — a dump of acid or caustic can be out of limit in seconds. Continuous pH with alerts catches it before it leaves site.
COD & organic load
Chemical oxygen demand drives both your bylaw limit and your bill. Continuous COD turns load into a number you manage, not a quarterly surprise. See water-quality sensors explained.
Flow & volume
Metered discharge volume — the other half of the bill, and a permit condition in its own right. Volume × load is what you're charged on.
Conductivity / TDS
Dissolved salts, often capped to protect the works' biological process and downstream reuse.
Temperature
Most bylaws limit discharge temperature; hot effluent from CIP, sterilising or process cooling is a common, easily-missed breach.
Fats, oils & grease
FOG and suspended-solids indicators for food, beverage and abattoir sites — a grease slug blocks sewers and breaches permits fast.
Compliance, cost and process — three returns from one connection point.
Stay inside the permit
Continuous, time-stamped proof that pH, COD, temperature and the rest stayed within your trade-effluent permit — and alerts that let you act on a drift before it's a breach the municipality samples.
Verify the effluent bill
When you're charged on COD load and volume you didn't measure, you're trusting someone else's estimate. Your own metered load lets you check the charge — and, where pre-treatment is cutting load, prove the lower number.
Catch shock loads early
A burst of acid, a CIP dump or a grease slug becomes an instant alert, so you divert to a balancing tank or correct dosing before it leaves site, chokes the sewer or triggers a penalty.
Tune your pre-treatment
Before/after sensing across screens, balancing, neutralisation, DAF and grease traps shows whether pre-treatment is actually performing — so you size, dose and maintain it on data, not guesswork.
Measure against your permit — and your bill.
- Start from the permit and the bylaw. The parameters, limits and charging formula in your trade-effluent permit define what we measure at the connection point and what we alert on.
- Instrument the discharge. Online pH, COD, conductivity, temperature and flow at the final connection — integrated with any analysers you already run.
- Alert before the limit. Thresholds set inside the bylaw limits, to WhatsApp or email, so a drift is an action and not an incident.
- Log for compliance and billing. Continuous, time-stamped records become both your compliance evidence and your independent check on a COD-load-based charge.
- Keep the record through outages. Edge buffering means load shedding never leaves a gap in your discharge record — on the addaNet platform, alongside your water, energy and production data.
Bylaws, charging formulae and permit limits differ by municipality and change over time. Treat references here as orientation and confirm current requirements against your own trade-effluent permit, the applicable local bylaw and your advisers.
Trade effluent questions.
Most trade-effluent projects start with a penalty letter, a bill that looks too high, or a sewer the municipality says you're choking. Here's how we approach them.
Prove your discharge — and check your bill.
Send us your trade-effluent permit conditions and a recent effluent invoice. We'll scope the connection-point monitoring to match your limits, set the alerts that keep you compliant, and give you the data to verify what you're charged.