Backflow Devices

[LindseyStone]

I was curious if anyone could give me some good examples to model backflow devices in the Water Utility network?

In our situation we would could have one service line with several backflow devices associated to that building.  For example we would have a commercial service line going into the building and we could have a backflow device on the actual service connection, another for an outside faucet (multiple ones if they have multiple faucets), and another that hooks into their lawn sprinkler system.

How would you go about showing that many backflow devices (since these are containments) associated to this one service?

[ASHAFFER]

Did you end up finding a good solution?

[PeterKing]

Bumping this topic to see if there are any good ideas or solutions.

[RobertKrisher]

If you want to model the customer's infrastructure, past the service connection, you can. You would want to create these as devices with a directional terminal configuration (similar to a check valve) so traces would take the directionality of the backflow prevention devices into account.

Do you really want to create, and more importantly do you want to maintain, this extra level of detail in your model? If a customer makes changes to the water infrastructure on their side of the connection, will you be notified about this (assuming they properly permit and construct it?). Are you going to be able to extract enough additional business value from this data to offset the cost of data collection and maintenance?