City of Cooper City, FL
REAL-TIME MONITORING TECHNOLOGY
Cooper City, an 8.3-square-mile bedroom community about 15 miles southwest of Fort Lauderdale, FL, is a municipal corporation created by a Special Act of the Florida Legislature in 1959. Cooper City’s wastewater collection system consists of 479,535 linear feet (LF) of gravity mains and 176,344 LF of force mains, 2,201 manholes, 83 lift stations, and one wastewater treatment plant that processes 2.5 million gallons a day (MGD).
With positive outcomes using the TCU001, Cooper City upgraded 81 units to TCU800s in 2024 to gain even more specific situational data, including the time and duration of an incident. The TCU800 processes faster, has a touch screen and improved graphic interface, and more inputs for up to 300 million amps.
Access to more information faster allows crews to make informed preparational decisions before heading to alarm sites. Response time improved and down times decreased. Now there is more focused maintenance and better time management, eliminating the need to spend a lot of time driving around checking on highrisk sites when crew time could have been better spent on other important operational issues.
Cooper City also incorporated SmartCover’s patented Symphony program with its TCU800 upgrade. Symphony coordinates the system-wide operation of sewer lift stations to reduce force main pressures and equalize flow into a master lift station or wastewater treatment plant. The result is a significant reduction in energy costs and a solution to daily peak-flows.
Pumps can be turned on and off remotely, especially when fats, oils, and grease (FOG) accumulate and hinder float balls from penetrating the muck to detect wastewater levels. FOG poses a frequent and costly challenge because they can block and corrode pipes and cause other pump issues.
In addition to upgrading to the TCU800 and incorporating the Symphony program, Cooper City added high-speed cellular radios into the new pump controllers and was able to reduce the SCADA system’s polling loop time for 83 stations from 3 minutes to 25 seconds.
During Hurricane Helene in September 2024, Cooper City lost power at two lift stations and a TCU alerted staff about the situation. That alarm gave the staff time to connect a generator at one station until Florida Power & Light was able to restore power. Just as a crew was about to connect a generator at the second lift station, Florida Power & Light arrived to restore power. Because of the alarms, there were no overflows, no cost for overtime and no worries about fines for SSOs.
Using data from the TCUs, Cooper City reported that during 2024 it saved approximately $69,000 in repairs and environmental fines using the SmartCover TCUs. That return on investment included a savings of $10,000 for each SSO that was avoided with help from the monitoring technology.
