Waterwell IQ
The platform
What the record holds, what the engine computes, and how the paper gets in.
The platform
Everything one well needs, for as long as it lives.
A physical well outlives the operator who drilled it, the engineer who rehabbed it and probably the software vendor who first recorded it. Waterwell IQ is built on that assumption: append-only, fully exportable, and yours.
Borehole intelligence, and the drawing checked
Casing, screen, filter pack, seal and lithology read in from the driller’s report with a citation to the page, approved by a person, and drawn as one section at true depth — with the pump at its setting, to one scale inside the casing it hangs in, solid where the size is on record and dashed where it is not. Then five checks run on the drawing: screen exposed above the pumping level, casing collapse margin, the annular seal against Bulletin 74-90, the pack against the slot, entrance velocity through the open area.
The water, over the record and right now
Every test’s static and pumping levels and, where SCADA is connected, the last week of readings on one depth axis with the bowls and the top of the screen drawn where they are: water over the screen, live, with watch and alarm thresholds; specific capacity and wire-to-water right now against the last test; what was pumped this week. A control-room view of it for a second monitor.
The answer first
Every well page opens on its answer — what to do, why, and what waiting a year costs — argued from evidence: baseline-referenced trends that restart at a pump replacement, well efficiency from the step test and transmissivity from the strongest test on file, with lost capacity priced as replacement water, equivalent uniform annual cost, and a remaining-life model you can put in front of a board. Where the record cannot support an answer, the page says what is missing.
Asset protection
Component-level condition against the operating region the pump is actually running in, with the correct vibration limit applied for that region — not one blanket threshold for every asset.
Lifecycle value, at the well’s own rate
The wells ranked by dollars per year recoverable, not by how many alarms they set off. Each meter can carry its utility’s time-of-use schedule or its own effective rate from twelve months of bills, so a well on a demand-charge tariff and a well on a solar contract are not priced with one blend; every dollar figure says which rate applied.
Work orders, where your crews are
Turn a diagnosis into a work order pre-filled with the cause, the recommended action and the cost at your rates, carrying a locked snapshot of the well as it stood that day. Hand it to Cityworks, Infor, Lucity, Maximo or NEXGEN with its reference — or to an inbox — and close it when the work is done.
Ask IQ
Ask any question about any well.
Ask IQ answers in plain English by calling the platform’s own tools against your record, and every number in the answer shows where it came from: the test, record, plan or document, and its date. It says what the numbers indicate, how sure it is, and which test would settle it. It is read-only, it sees only what your title allows, and every exchange is kept where your district can audit it.
Every number cited
A figure in an answer carries its source — the tool, the well and the date — and opens the page it came from. Where the record does not hold the answer, Ask IQ says what is missing and which document or test would supply it, instead of estimating.
It opens on a briefing
Three tiles before the first question: the wells that need attention, this month on your utility schedule, and the next month a well has to be acted on — each with “ask about this”. Starter questions by role, and a “/” menu of commands: brief, why, trend, compare, forecast, what-if, budget, time-of-use, gaps and source.
Read-only, and on record
Ask IQ never writes to the record and never to a controller. It answers as the person asking, with that person’s access, and each exchange is kept for the district. Included in every membership.
Production and energy budget
Peak, mid-peak and off-peak, priced the way your bill is.
Each meter carries its utility schedule and option, so every pumping hour is priced by its time-of-use period, demand charges included. The Budget tab puts the fleet against the month, says which rate option each meter should be on, prices the last acre-foot from every source against the water you would otherwise buy, and builds next year’s budget well by well from your own metered months, with the range it rests on.
Every hour at its period’s price
Southern California Edison’s agricultural and pumping schedules are built in rate for rate — TOU-PA-2 and TOU-PA-3, Options D and E and their 5-to-8 p.m. variants — with facilities and time-related demand. The run schedule fills the cheapest hours first, within each well’s limits, and downloads for your integrator; the platform never writes to a controller.
Pump it, or buy it
The cost of each well’s next acre-foot, energy included, against the price of the water you would buy instead — your own price, or a published default labeled as one until you enter yours — and the cheapest rate option for each meter from its own load.
A year ahead, and one page for the board
Each well’s months ahead with the act-by month — when a declining well stops fitting its budget outside the expensive hours — and its cause; what acting now would change; and a one-page brief for the board that prints on Letter paper, every figure traceable to the tab.
See the platform
This is what a district sees. Open it yourself.
These are screens from the demo district — seven production wells and a sealed one, with sixty years of synthetic but physically consistent records, scored by the same engine that runs the platform. No login, no sales call: open it and click around.
Every well, ranked by money.
The first screen a general manager sees: the fleet sorted by Well IQ, with the diagnosis, the remaining life, the policy’s recommended action and what a year of waiting is expected to cost — computed from the tests on file, not typed in.
- Capacity and efficiency bands against the current baseline
- Recoverable energy and the cost of waiting, fleet-wide
- Nothing derived is stored — every figure recomputes from the raw record
The answer first: what to do, why, and what waiting costs.
Every well opens on one answer — the recommended action and the verdict, the cost of waiting a year, the reasons with the evidence behind them and the steps to take — with the five options and their expected lifetime cost one click away. Then six views of the same well: Overview, Performance, Pump, Construction, Water and Record.
- The diagnosis and its confidence, computed from the tests on file
- Where nothing can be forecast, the page says what is missing
- Raise a work order or ask Ask IQ about the well from the answer
The maker’s curve, at the speed you actually run.
The published head, efficiency and power curves scaled by the affinity laws to the drive speed on record, shown as a percentage, in hertz and in rpm. The measured point sits against the curve, the preferred and allowable operating regions are drawn at the 70–120% and 50–130% of best-efficiency flow in general use under ANSI/HI 9.6.3, and the estimated system curve shows where the two meet.
- Head, efficiency and brake horsepower from the catalog points, monotone-interpolated so nothing overshoots
- Speed strip: the 0–60 Hz operating range, the minimum speed that still lifts static head, and the lineshaft critical speed computed from the pump’s own rotordynamics
- Scales cleanly from a 25 gpm domestic pump to a 10,000 gpm, 900 ft municipal well
A report the finance officer can read.
Letter-size pages per well, as many as the record fills: the decision and its budget first, then the Well IQ score with every component and its weight, the diagnosis with the evidence behind it, the pump against its own curve, and the complete record it was computed from. Printable, signable, and reproducible years later because it carries the engine version that produced it.
- Condition now against the segment baseline
- Expected lifetime cost of deferring, rehabilitating, re-pumping, both, or replacing
- Every test and event on file, cited
The water — over the record, and right now.
Every test’s static and pumping levels and, where SCADA is connected, the last week of readings on one depth axis, with the bowls and the top of the screen drawn where they are. Water over the bowls and over the screen, live, with watch and alarm thresholds; specific capacity and wire-to-water right now against the last test; what was pumped this week from the totalizer, with the gaps estimated and said so. The same card opens as a control-room view for a second monitor.
- Margins with the years to reach them at the static trend — a straight line, never a forecast
- Live specific capacity using a rest of four hours or more as the static reference
- Run hours and starts from the drive; a control-room view re-read every minute
The well as built — and the pump in it, to scale.
One section at true depth: the formation from the driller’s log, the casing, screens, pack and seal from the record, the water levels from the latest test, and the pump at its setting — bowls per recorded stage, column, head and motor — drawn to one scale inside the casing it hangs in. Sizes on record are solid; anything not on record is dashed at a typical proportion and says so. Beneath it, five construction checks run every time the page opens.
- The share of flow by screened layer, labeled an indication
- Screen exposed above the pumping level, casing collapse margin, the seal, the pack against the slot, entrance velocity
- Every row names the document it was read from, or the person who typed it
Ask about your wells, in plain English.
Ask IQ opens on a briefing — the wells that need attention, this month on the utility schedule, the next act-by month — with starter questions by role and a “/” menu of commands. Its answers cite every figure to the tool, well and date it came from, say how sure they are, and name what is missing when the record cannot answer.
- Read-only: it never writes to the record or a controller
- Answers with the asker’s own access; every exchange kept for the district
- Included in every membership
The month, the year ahead, and one page for the board.
Where the fleet stands against the month, what each well still owes, and when to run so the water arrives at the lowest cost the tariff allows — every hour priced by its time-of-use period, demand included. A year ahead by well with the act-by month and its cause, what acting now would change, and a brief for the board on one Letter page.
- Southern California Edison’s agricultural and pumping schedules, rate for rate
- The cheapest option for each meter, and pumping against the water you would buy
- Volumes from SCADA first, then meter readings — each well says which
Open the demo district
A sandbox that keeps nothing you type, nothing to install, works on a phone. Add a test to a well and watch the score, the diagnosis and the policy recompute; open the pump curve; print a board report. Then send us one of your own wells and see it on real records.
The data model
A well is not a point on a map.
Every asset platform a water utility can buy inherits a geometry-first model, because they were all built for pipes. A well is a depth-indexed vertical profile with a time-varying performance curve and a sixty-year event history. That shape does not fit in a row of flat attributes, which is why nobody has been able to answer basic questions about wells from software they already own.
| What Waterwell IQ holds | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Casing, screen, filter pack and seal as dated depth intervals | The schematic is generated from the record, so a date slider shows the well as it stood in any year. There is no separate drawing to fall out of step. |
| Measuring points, dated | A rehabilitation that cuts the casing down shifts every historical depth reading. Without dated measuring points the whole hydrograph is quietly wrong. |
| Events, not fields | A rehabilitation is an event with pre and post specific capacity attached, which makes “did the rehabilitation work?” a query rather than an argument. |
| Faceted status | Physical, regulatory, availability, use, water quality and current activity as six independent facts, each separately dated — not one enum trying to carry all six. |
| Append-only history | Nothing is overwritten. A correction is a new record that supersedes the old one with a reason, because a watermaster has four years to query a figure you already filed. |
| Lifecycle forecast, stored with its model | Each well carries its condition state, its expected remaining life, and a recommended action with the lifetime cost of every alternative — kept with the transition model that produced it, so the forecast a board acted on can be reproduced years later. |
Your data stays yours. Every table, every attachment and every audit entry is exportable at any time in open formats. No lock-in, no hostage-taking on exit, and no training models on customer data — written into the contract, not just the marketing.
The signature capability
Three causes. One symptom. Three very different invoices.
A well delivering less water at a higher energy cost could be a worn pump, a fouled screen, or an aquifer that is simply dropping. Pulling the pump costs tens of thousands. A rehabilitation costs six figures. A replacement well costs millions. Most districts are guessing.
Pump wear
Head deficit against the factory curve at normal amps, with the pumping level unchanged and specific capacity flat.
Check the lateral setting before you budget a rebuild. Semi-open impellers raised just forty thousandths of an inch above ideal can cost ten percent of your flow — and that is a shim, not a pump pull.
Screen fouling
The pumping level deepens at the same flow, specific capacity declines, and sand or turbidity often rises with it.
A rising well-loss coefficient across successive step-drawdown tests is the cleanest quantitative evidence of fouling that exists. Waterwell IQ computes it from the tests you already run.
Aquifer decline
The static level falls, specific capacity stays stable, and the wells around you show the same trend.
This is a twenty-year capital planning question, not a maintenance ticket. Knowing the difference is the difference between a shim and a bond measure.
Why no one else does this. Every pump monitoring platform assumes a fixed system curve. A well pump lifts against a water level that moves seasonally, secularly and as the screen fouls — so its operating point migrates with no mechanical change at all. Point a generic platform at a municipal well and it will raise a false wear alarm every August.
The pump curve stage
The maker’s curve, at the speed you actually run.
Every well carries its pump’s published curve. The stage redraws it at the drive speed on record, places the measured point on it, and marks the four things an engineer looks for first: the best-efficiency point, the shutoff head, where the system curve crosses, and how far the measured point sits from the curve.
The curve
Head, efficiency and power from the catalog points, joined by a monotone cubic (Fritsch–Carlson) so the drawn curve never overshoots a published point. With only shutoff, best-efficiency and rated points on file, a head-versus-flow fit of the form H = H₀ − k·Qᵖ is used instead, and the stage says so.
Speed
The published curve is at full speed. The drawn curve is scaled to the drive speed on record by the affinity laws — flow with speed, head with speed squared, power with speed cubed — and the speed is shown three ways: as a percentage, in hertz (60 Hz × speed) and in rpm (rated rpm × speed).
Efficiency and power
Pump efficiency is drawn as a curve through the best-efficiency point; brake horsepower follows from flow, head and efficiency (Q·H ÷ 3960·η) and is plotted beneath the head curve against the motor nameplate, so a pump running into its service factor is visible rather than inferred.
Operating regions
The preferred operating region is drawn at 70–120% of best-efficiency flow and the allowable region at 50–130% — the bands in general use for rotodynamic pumps, and the default this platform applies. ANSI/HI 9.6.3 is the governing standard and sets these limits by pump type, so where a maker publishes its own regions for the pump on record, those are the ones to use. The stage names the region the measured point is in, because the vibration limit that applies depends on it.
Where the curves meet
An estimated system curve — static lift plus a friction term rising with the square of flow — is fitted through the measured point. Where it crosses the pump curve is the flow and head the plant should be producing; the gap between that and the measured point is the wear signal.
The speed strip
Normal operation is 0–60 Hz from start-up to running; above 60 Hz only with the pump maker’s approval. The strip marks the minimum speed at which the pump can still lift the static head (below it the pump idles at shutoff), the running speed in Hz, percent and rpm, and the lineshaft critical speed computed from the pump’s own rotordynamics (shaft, spacing, bowls and the motor’s reed frequency) as a hatched band — with a verdict on whether the running speed can reach it, including the case where it sits above the drive’s maximum and cannot.
Any size of well
The axes fit the pump on record: a 200 gpm well with 50 ft of head and a 10,000 gpm well with 900 ft of head both plot cleanly, with the ticks, the labels and the operating regions laid out so nothing collides. Verified from 25 gpm upward.
Lifecycle forecasting
When to act — not just whether.
Every serious infrastructure asset plan runs on condition-state deterioration models. Nobody had applied one to wells, because a well degrades two ways at once: the screen and the pump, each reset by a different intervention. Two chains, one decision process, and a policy for every state — solved in your browser by the same engine that runs the platform.
The live lifecycle simulation needs JavaScript. The method is described in full on the Methodology page.
Default deterioration priors and demo cost assumptions. In the platform the matrices are estimated from your fleet’s own test history, every row reporting how much of it is your evidence rather than the prior, and the costs are your finance officer’s numbers. The arithmetic is on the Methodology page.
Getting the paper in
Sixty years of records. Nobody has had time since 1994.
Nobody buys asset software because of the dashboard. They buy it because somebody finally offered to get the filing cabinet in. So that is what we do first: your first well at no cost, and the whole cabinet as part of onboarding.
Send it any way you like
Drag a folder in, forward an email to your district address, or let your contractor upload straight to the work order. Scanned, photographed or native — it all goes to the same place.
Machine-readable files are simply parsed
LAS geophysical logs, SCADA exports and CMMS feeds are read by code, not by a model. Exact, free, and incapable of inventing anything.
Everything else is read and cited
A 1976 driller’s log typed on a manual typewriter with handwritten margin notes gets read page by page. Every extracted value carries a confidence score and a citation back to the page and the spot on it.
It is checked against physics and against your history
Pumping level below static. Screens inside total depth. Annular seal against your county’s ordinance, not just the state minimum. A water level that jumps forty feet from last year is flagged, never accepted.
An engineer approves before anything is committed
The source page sits beside the field, highlighted. Confident, validated values approve as a batch; anything uncertain is shown one at a time; anything that would overwrite an existing value needs a reason that is written to the audit log.
The score updates itself
The engine recomputes, snapshots the result with its version stamp, and tells you only when a threshold has actually been crossed — in acre-feet and dollars, not in “anomaly detected”.
One rule we will not bend. The system never invents a measurement. If a value is not printed on the page, it stays empty and appears in your gap report. A record you cannot trace back to a document is not a record — it is a guess with a timestamp.
The live ingestion demonstration needs JavaScript. Every extracted value carries the page it came from and the confidence it was read with; anything not printed stays empty.
| Document | Method | What it fills in |
|---|---|---|
| Driller’s log / well completion report | Read | Lithology, casing, screen and seal intervals, license, filing clock |
| E-log / geophysical survey | Parsed | LAS curve data and screen-siting evidence |
| Pump efficiency test | Read | One row per speed, wire-to-water efficiency, kWh per acre-foot, incentive eligibility |
| Step-drawdown / aquifer test | Read | Aquifer and well-loss coefficients, well efficiency, specific capacity |
| Installation / start-up sheet | Read | Pump and motor identity, lateral setting, checklist, signatures |
| Video and caliper survey | Read | Depth-tagged defects, encrustation, casing wall loss by depth |
| Rehabilitation report | Read | Event with pre and post specific capacity, method, cost, contractor |
| SCADA historian export | Parsed | Continuous operating points and run hours |
See it on your own wells
Send us a driller’s log, an efficiency test and a start-up sheet for one well. We will read them into a live record and show you the score, the trend and the money.
The document it all ends in
Every well produces a board-ready condition report: the recommendation and its budget on page one, the score with every component and its weight, the diagnosis with its evidence, the pump against its own curve, the well’s efficiency, its water margins and its construction checked, and the complete record it was computed from — every row citing its document. See the report, page by page — or download a real one.