Keeping Sludge AD Working

Southern Water has an important routine; every single day it checks the health of its sewage sludge anaerobic digesters on eighteen sites. There, each day Southern Water treats and recycles 1,400 million litres of wastewater from nearly two million households at 373 treatment works from its 21,500-kilometre sewer network. With that huge responsibility this utility company, like any other, needs to ensure the security of its sewage sludge digesters working at their optimum. Central to achieving that is Southern Water’s ‘Best Practice for the Operation of Sludge Digesters’. It produced this document to ensure industry best practice operating routines are carried out at each site. They include daily analysis of pH/alkalinity, volatile fatty acids (VFAs) and biogas composition.