WAGAMET AG, a company that works for water and gas supply utilities
Over 25 years of experience:
The Wagamet company was founded in 1982. Its task was defined as to be a service provider for water and gas supply utilities in the fields of leak location and loss analysis. As a result of the utilities’ great interest in being able to carry out location tasks themselves, Wagamet decided to develop and produce its own of leak-location equipment.
Already in 1982, first flow-measurement trailers were built and sold internationally.
In 1992 the company’s own mechanical vibration and ground microphone (LOG1) was first manufactured and marketed. The LOG1 was followed by the world’s first correlator on the basis of a notebook PC (LOG2000). In addition to the then "established" fault-location methods using flow measurements, research was continued in the field of audible leak location and, in 1996, the DS500 permanent early recognition system for leaks was completed. At that time, the state of the art allowed the registration of leak locations by means of vibration measurements and the evaluation of results using infrared interfaces. In order to make the collection of the measured data more efficient, this revolutionary technology was very soon augmented with a radio transmission system.
The legal structure of the company was changed in 1999 from sole proprietorship to a limited company.
In 2002, Wagamet developed the Ortomat system for the permanent early detection of leaks, which used highly sensitive acceleration sensors and intelligent electronics: this greatly simplified applications and measured data analysis. With the Ortomat system, a new era in the area of early leak recognition was heralded.
In 2004, the first branch office was set up in Reutlingen (Stuttgart).
In 2005, Wagamet AG was integrated into the vonRoll hydro group. Due to lack of space in the production facilities, the company then moved on 1.1.2007 to Rueeggisingerstrasse 2 in Emmenbruecke.
During 2000 and 2009 various projects in Africa, Asia, South America and Europe were realised in addition to those in Switzerland. Here, the local water utilities were effectively helped with technically superior measuring instruments and well-trained technicians in their fight against drinking water loss.
Wagamet today:
Today, 40,000 measuring instruments are in use for the early recognition and exact location of leaks in drinking water pipelines worldwide.
Wagamet makes continuous efforts to adapt its measuring instruments to the current state of the art and to simplify their use. In addition to the development of a new Ortomat generation, much energy is been spent on the development of automatic data read-out from existing Ortomat systems using an intelligent transmitter systems. Here, the primary goal is to keep the period of time between the occurrence of a leak and the generation of an alarm as low as possible and, by repairing the leak as fast as possible, look after drinking water resources in an optimal way.
In 2009, Wagamet AG had a staff of 25 employees and, with its 12 leak location vehicles based at five sites in Switzerland, is in action every day to maintain water and gas supplies.
Wagamet tomorrow:
Wagamet’s mission is the development and manufacture of leak location equipment and associated services which, in a forward-looking way, can tackle present and future problems in the water distribution and gas supply sectors. This can be in the development of new location techniques, data transfer and management or in the training of employees.
Benjamin Franklin once wrote:
"When the well's dry, we know the worth of water“
Today, Wagamet does everything it can to dramatise "the value of the water" worldwide in order to prevent such "dry wells".