Meet the SmartBall: Austin Water's 'Eyes and Ears' on Our Pipelines

At Austin Water, our distribution system includes more than 4,000 miles of water lines, or enough to send water from Austin to Hawaii! These pipes are almost all buried underground across our 544-square-mile service area, so it's a lot to maintain and monitor for leaks. When one of those pipes does spring a leak, it's up to our crews to find and fix it, pronto. After all, every drop counts, so we value early leak detection — hopefully before it's ever even reported. 

But how do you find an underground leak so small that water never even shows up on the surface? One of the coolest tools our pipeline workers use in the field while they're tracking down sneaky leaks is called the SmartBall® by Pure Technologies. It's a soft foam ball that looks kind of like a pool toy, wrapped around a smaller aluminum ball that's packed with sensors and instruments designed to detect leaks inside active water lines.

When we're looking for a leak, we squish the ball through a small tap in a pipe and let it swim free, gathering information with acoustic sensors that listen for the sound of escaping water. The SmartBall is smart enough to hear a leak that's only the size of a pinhole! 

When we're trying to find a leak before it gets bigger and might require shutting off your water or digging up your street, this ball is our best friend. It's also helping minimize water lost through leaks, and we all know how important that is.

There's a lot happening under your feet as Austin Water works to improve reliability across our water system without disrupting your daily life, and the SmartBall is just one of the ways we prepare our infrastructure for the needs of tomorrow. Visit austinwater.org to learn more about the work we're doing to build Austin's water future, together.