Stringency of Water Conservation Determines Drinking Water Quality Trade-Offs: Lessons Learned from a Full-Scale Water Distribution System

Demand variations over time affect the hydraulic and water quality behavior of water distribution systems. Therefore, it is important to assess the network performance under various future water demand scenarios to plan effectively for demand management strategies, considering the network’s topology, volume, and operational conditions. The performance of a full-scale water distribution system is evaluated by means of hydraulic and water quality simulations under different hypothetical demand management strategies. Residential and nonresidential consumptions are varied, resulting in different global multiplicative factors (from 0.53 to 1.18). Criteria including water loss, velocity, water age, free chlorine, and THMs are selected to compare the performance of the network between the current scenario and eight demand scenarios. Water conservation generally increases nodal water age values more in smaller diameter pipes. A nodal chlorine residual reliability index is proposed to account for the duration of low chlorine residuals. With a goal of maintaining a reference free chlorine concentration of ≥0.2 mg/L, the reliability index is less than 0.9 for about 14% of nodes under the reference scenario and this proportion increases to 34% of nodes under the most extreme future water conservation scenario. The robustness of the studied network under different water conservation scenarios is tested by increasing the chlorine residual at the outlet of the WTPs from 1 to 2 mg/L. This is an easily implemented adjustment and dramatically improves the chlorine reliability (<0.9 at only 15% of the nodes), even for the most extreme future water conservation scenario. However, this reliability comes at the cost of higher yet compliant THM concentrations for the low demand scenarios, revealing the challenges of balancing competing water quality goals. With a goal of maintaining a reference level of THMs at ≤80 ug/L, the THM reliability index is ≥0.9 at almost all nodes even under the most extreme conservation scenario. The evaluation of self-cleaning potential velocities shows that sufficient velocities can only be reached at daily maximum flow in 5% of smaller diameter piping even in the reference scenario.