Community & Business
24 October, 2024
Water pressure is pumping
RESIDENTS might be feeling the pressure now that new water booster pumps are up and running in Mareeba.
Council heard at its meeting last week the pumps, which have replaced the old gravity-fed system from the town’s water towers, were activated on 10 October.
Waste and Water Operations Manager Morris Hamill said his team had been checking pressure readings, flushing the system to ensure no air traps, and talking to residents.
“Pressure in some areas has gone from 230 kPa (kilopascal) to 350 kPa.”
Mr Hamill said a number of factors had impacted household water pressure in the past year, including location in Mareeba, how the “the dry got dry very quickly”, which had never really happened before”, and the demand period for water had changed.
“What we did find was at that between 8am and 10am period, a second pump was having to come in for about an hour, and again from about 4.30 to about 10pm at night, a second pump was coming in, which just highlighted the massive spike in water use in those periods.”
He said following complaints about water pressure before the boosters were switched on, he had rung a resident to follow up on the issue.
“When I spoke with her at about 7 am, they had four sprinklers running, the little round ones which pump out 9 litres a second each - so there’s 40 litres a second; they had kids having showers and getting ready for school; they had the washing machine going; and mum was doing the washing up as well,” Mr Hamill said.
“They were consuming, just in one house in one street, quite a large amount of water. So, if you get multiple people doing that in a street, you’re going to pare back the amount of pressure you have.”
Now the booster pumps were running, there were no more issues. However, CEO Peter Franks urged people with automatic sprinklers to set them to go off after midnight, outside of the high demand periods.
“That would make a huge difference. It’s a lot more effective to irrigate at night,” he said.
Local government is meant to provide a minimum standard of between 220 kPa, to a maximum of 500.
The new boosters had capacity to reach 720 kPa, and the plan was to continue to increase steadily upwards, to improve household water pressure.
“We don’t want to just go and ramp the pumps up because then we could potentially start popping mains, so we’re just going to do it slowly over the next few months,” Mr Hamill said.
