Alex Churchill is the CEO and a board member at InfoSense, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based company developing acoustic inspection technologies for wastewater systems. Over the past eight years, he’s been leading the company’s growth from an NSF-supported research partnership with Charlotte Water to a global provider serving more than 2,000 municipalities and inspecting over 500 million feet of pipe. A Chartered Manager and Chartered Physicist, Alex brings a background in engineering, manufacturing, and business leadership, with prior senior roles in operations and consulting, including at Booz & Company.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:09] Alex Churchill reflects on becoming an early pioneer in the smart sewer and wastewater technology space
• [3:04] Why wastewater infrastructure careers matter more than people realize
• [6:07] Alex discusses transitioning from manufacturing and consulting to leading a sewer technology company
• [8:27] How the Sewer Line Rapid Assessment Tool (SL-RAT) works and its significance
• [10:10] How InfoSense validated its technology and expanded beyond Charlotte
• [15:28] The importance of continuous R&D investment in refining a highly specialized product
• [17:35] Entering the smart sewer market ahead of widespread sensor adoption
• [35:16] Why executive sponsorship is critical for technology adoption in large utilities
• [41:49] The future of wastewater infrastructure, sensors, and data-driven decision-making

In this episode…

Most people don’t think twice about what’s happening beneath their feet until something goes wrong. Aging sewer systems, limited budgets, and reactive maintenance have quietly become one of the biggest infrastructure challenges facing communities today. Can we replace guesswork with data that shows exactly where problems are hiding? How would that change utility operations if data could reveal exactly where problems lie?

According to Alex Churchill, a longtime innovator in wastewater technology and operations, the answer starts with useful information and a willingness to rethink old habits. He explains that most sewer systems don’t fail evenly; instead, a small portion of pipes cause the majority of problems, while the rest often don’t need attention at all. Drawing from years of field experience, Alex describes how rapid acoustic screening helps utilities focus their time, money, and crews where it actually matters. He also shares how initial skepticism from utilities pushed the technology to improve through rigorous testing and real-world validation. Ultimately, his approach is about removing uncertainty, enabling leaders to move from guesswork to informed, confident decision-making.

In this episode of Saving Our Sewers, Kwin Peterson interviews Alex Churchill, CEO at InfoSense, about the evolution of smart sewer technology and what it takes to modernize wastewater systems. Alex discusses the origins of the Sewer Line Rapid Assessment Tool (SL-RAT), lessons from scaling a niche technology, and why leadership buy-in is critical for change.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Jon Borden on LinkedIn 
• RH Borden and Company
• Kwin Peterson on LinkedIn
• Alex Churchill on LinkedIn
• InfoSense: Website | Email | Phone 704-644-1164
• Sewer Line Rapid Assessment Tool (SL-RAT) 
• Sewer Line Data Organizer (SL-DOG) 
• Charlotte Water

Quotable Moments: 

• “I always wanted to be a wastewater collection system engineer.”
• “We need more people that want to be wastewater collection system operators, and electricians, and plumbers, and engineers.”
• “The test itself takes about a minute and a half.”
• “It was a very gradual experience, I would say more like the morning fog lifting.”
• “We’re lifting the fog, and we’re looking for needles in haystacks.”

Action Steps: 

1. Use rapid screening tools before committing to sewer cleaning or CCTV inspections: This ensures resources are focused only on pipes that actually need attention.
2. Adopt data-driven maintenance instead of time-based cleaning schedules: This reduces wasted spending on pipes that are already clean and functioning properly.
3. Invest in technologies that prioritize speed and scalability: Faster assessments allow utilities to understand system-wide conditions without overwhelming budgets or crews.
4. Integrate field data with asset and GIS systems early: Accurate data association improves decision-making and prevents costly errors downstream.
5. Encourage curiosity and innovation within infrastructure teams: Openness to new approaches helps utilities evolve beyond legacy practices that no longer serve them well.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by RH Borden, the leading service provider for innovative technologies that modernize wastewater collection system maintenance.

As Smart Cities evolve, RH Borden empowers communities to leverage data, optimize maintenance resources, and improve system performance. Their digital twin solutions help teams work more efficiently, minimize redundant maintenance, and pinpoint infrastructure issues with precision.

Learn more about how RH Borden is shaping the future of wastewater system management by visiting rhborden.com.

Powered by Rise25 Podcast Production Company

Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:03

The US Infrastructure Report Card gives the nation’s wastewater systems a grade of D+. Welcome to the Saving Our Sewers podcast, where we feature the practices, tools, technology and ideas that will save our sewers. Let’s get into it.

Kwin Peterson: 00:20

Kwin Peterson here. I’m today’s host of the Saving Our Sewers podcast, where we feature city leaders, innovative thinkers, and infrastructure experts who are shaping the future of wastewater infrastructure. And of course, this episode has a sponsor. It’s brought to you by RH Borden, who is providing innovative technologies that modernize the wastewater collection system maintenance. RH Borden’s approaches can save mid-sized and large systems 6 to 8 figures annually, and for small systems, they can mean the difference between proactive and reactive system maintenance.

You can learn more about RH Borden and how they’re shaping the future of wastewater by visiting our rhborden.com Now, with that message from our sponsor out of the way, I’m super excited to have with me on the podcast one of the OGs of the smart sewer space, Mr. Alex Churchill. Alex is the CEO and co-owner of InfoSense, the Charlotte, North Carolina based manufacturer of the award winning Sewer Line Rapid Assessment Tool, or the SL-RAT. Over the last 14 years, he has been working with InfoSense and has seen the company go from the inventor’s basement and a research partnership with Charlotte Water and the National Science Foundation, to having over 2000 municipalities using the technology and over 500,000,000ft of pipe inspected.

Alex gets up every day knowing that InfoSense is making a difference in our communities, helping them save time, water and money, and focusing their sewer cleaning efforts. Alex, as you can tell, I am a super fan of the SL rat, so thank you for being on the podcast. Thanks for thanks for what you’re doing.

Alex Churchill: 02:09

Well thanks Kwin and time passes. Being considered the OG, I still think back to when we were first starting out and no one knew who we were, and our first wccftech in 2012 and just starting from from one customer, the city of Charlotte, and and building out to where we are now that we’re actually considered an OG. It’s yeah, I’m getting to be an OG, but I still like the company isn’t an OG.

Kwin Peterson: 02:41

Well, you know, we and I have corresponded quite a bit, but it’s always been about business stuff. I’d love to hear a little bit about your background and Alex, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Alex Churchill: 02:54

I always wanted to be a wastewater collection system engineer. Really?

Kwin Peterson: 03:02

That is a very rare answer to that question.

Alex Churchill: 03:04

Yeah, it is, isn’t it? And I think it’s probably a little too rare because we’re in a critical part of our communities infrastructure, and there’s a lot of people that want to be a rap star or a football player or a ballerina or something like that. But we need more people that want to be wastewater collection system operators and electricians and plumbers and engineers and all the folks that make this stuff happen behind the scenes that people take for granted.

Kwin Peterson: 03:37

Absolutely. And I keep telling people, I’ll run into people, young people, young operators at conferences. And I’m like, this is a great career. You should totally stick into this. And generally speaking, they agree.

So yeah, I think once you get past the kind of the odor of the career, which isn’t really there, I mean, in many cases it’s just a fantastic job and so rewarding or at least it can be. And maybe we’ll talk about that in a little bit.

Alex Churchill: 04:11

I’ve but you were asking what I wanted to be when I was. Yeah.

Kwin Peterson: 04:14

Yeah I’ll, we’ll come back to how your tool makes that career a little bit more enjoyable. But yeah. Tell me about it.

Alex Churchill: 04:21

When I was young. I liked to work on cars. I had an old beater car when I was 16, and we had a lot of cars when I was growing up. So I was kind of a grease monkey, gearhead kind of guy. And when I went to college, I thought I wanted to be an engineer because I thought I would learn more about working on cars.

I did not know that working on cars and being an engineer are not directly related. Maybe designing the car, but not necessarily doing the work. And then I became somewhat fascinated with manufacturing. That’s where I ended up going after my undergrad degree, and I’m still fascinated by manufacturing. Operations have a lot to it.

There’s things that just as you’re doing things, you learn so many nuances and tricks of the trade and, and build the tools and infrastructure to, to make what you make as a manufacturer. And I’ve toured automotive plants, salad dressing plants, plastic bag manufacturing plants are many, many places that I’ve been to over the years. And every one of them, the most mundane thing that you could have, whether it’s the pencil or pen I have here to, you know, to things like your computer just so much that goes into all this stuff and we kind of take it for granted. But it’s always fascinated me, and that’s kind of how I ended up getting into this, getting into this space.

Kwin Peterson: 05:56

Yeah. So yeah. Tell me, how did you end up going from gearhead engineer into smart sewer and wastewater?

Alex Churchill: 06:07

Well, the circuitous let’s put it that way. Yeah. So. I worked in manufacturing after undergrad and then went back and got an MBA and went to Carnegie Mellon for business school. It’s a great analytical business program and did some consulting work after that with a big consulting firm, and from there went on to more operationally oriented things.

So I work for a company called Blue Rhino Propane Tank Exchange. So smelly. So that’s where we’re getting into the we’re you’re starting to see where we’re headed. Ran a bunch of stuff for Blue Rhino and then went to a company called Allied Waste, which is now part of Republic Big Public Wastewater Operator or waste Solid waste operation. And again smelly.

And so you can see, you know, from propane to garbage. So it’s a natural progression into what.

Kwin Peterson: 07:08

A nose for this business.

Alex Churchill: 07:10

Yes I’ve got a nose for this business. But really after I left Allied Waste and was looking to buy a company and I was involved with an angel investment fund in Charlotte. This is, you know, back to 2011. And the guy who was running the fund said, I know you like weird industrial stuff, and I know this crazy genius professor who’s got this great technology and you guys should meet. And I had a four hour meeting with who turned out to be my partner, Ivan or Doctor Ivan Howitt.

And we met at a coffee shop by Unk Charlotte, and he was explaining things to me that were somewhat challenging to understand that having not been in the industry and not knowing what he was doing, and that’s how we we just started working together, he he needed business help, and I wasn’t sure if he had a viable idea. So we kind of worked together and fleshed it out.

Kwin Peterson: 08:10

Well, we’ll come back to those early days of the company. I’m really interested to hear about that. But just for our listeners here, maybe if you could briefly describe this invention that Ivan came up with, how it works and why it’s important.

Alex Churchill: 08:27

Yeah. So Kwin, the Sewer Line Rapid Assessment Tool is the product that we have. Most people in the industry know it as the SL rat. Some people refer to it just as ratting. We’re going to go to our sewer system.

But again it’s that rapid assessment tool is the key part of it, and the way the technology works is it’s got a transmitter that sits on one manhole and a receiver that sits on the adjacent manhole. The transmitter sends a known signal, the audible sound range of tones from a low base to a high treble, and injects that sound signal into the sewer pipe. And that signal travels in the air gap above the sewage flow. In the pipe, the receiver’s listening for that known signal, and based on how dampened or degraded the signal is, it can give you an idea of how blocked the pipe is. And it does that without any contact with the waste flow.

I’ve never been inside a manhole all the years I’ve been doing this, so there’s no contact with the waste flow. And the test itself takes about a minute and a half. So that’s the rapid part of it. And that makes it about 10 to 20 times faster and 10 to 20 times cheaper than alternative inspection methods or cleaning. And ultimately, that’s what makes it a viable screening tool to screen sewer systems for blockages.

Kwin Peterson: 09:53

You know, everybody who uses this tool regularly is a huge fan of it. Was that obvious when you saw this tool when you were talking with Ivan about it at the coffee shop.

Alex Churchill: 10:10

The value appeared to be there. He had a minimum viable product, or MVP as they describe it in a startup manual. And he had been working with the city of Charlotte for several years, and they were a great development partner. Helping him create a tool that was fast, easy to use, and was able to do all these things that it does. But we didn’t know if Charlotte at the time, we didn’t know enough about the industry.

So we didn’t know. Was the city of Charlotte the only utility in the world that had these problems? Or did all utilities have these problems? Because that was our sample set was one entity. And

In that early phase, we had everyone that we were trying to sell the equipment to or sell on. The concept of doing this wanted to prove to themselves that the technology worked. And so it was always an effort. Everybody wanted to be their own science junior scientist and do their own study. And those that made the first sales are always the hardest.

And those ones were very hard because it really got put through the wringer at a lot of these places. But that also helped us identify additional needs that customers had. And as we got into doing it, was Charlotte the only entity that had this problem, or was it many utilities or all utilities? And how many utilities were there? And could we do this just in the United States, or were the sewer systems the same in other parts of the world?

You know, all those questions came about. And then as we got to doing it, determining the economics of learning that this is 10 to 20 times faster and 10 to 20 times cheaper than CCTV or cleaning. It took us a while to get those numbers together and be able to develop a real value proposition. And it was those things that kind of happened at the same time. There was product development and there was market understanding and product development, market understanding that occurred.

I would say over the first couple of years that I was working with Ivan, and I should mention That he started this in 2005, and I didn’t meet him until 2011, so he spent a solid full time, 2 to 3 years of of of research developing this and a bunch more time, part time prior to that, before it even got to the point of being a minimum viable product. So it was a pretty significant research effort that went into inventing this.

Kwin Peterson: 13:03

And was even interested in wastewater. What was what got a bee in his bonnet to devote three years of time to to this, to this project or this problem, or was it even a problem? How did this happen?

Alex Churchill: 13:17

So Ivan’s background and I would say he is a PhD electrical engineer. He was a tenured professor at UNC Charlotte and his background was statistical signal processing. That was and he did a lot of it in the radio frequency spectrum, so that he was a very specialized engineer working in a very specialized area. But Ivan is also an engineer who wants to solve problems. And so in 2005, Charlotte was having hundreds of overflows per year.

They were cleaning 25% of their sewer system a year, still having all these problems, and they just came to the university. Some of the utility staff, senior utility staff, came to the university and met with a group of professors, and he just happened to be invited and sat in the room and thought, maybe, maybe there’s a way I could help these folks. Maybe I could find a way to send a signal through the pipe and help them figure out which pipes are blocked and which ones aren’t, so they know which ones they should clean and which ones they shouldn’t. That’s really how this all started. And Ivan is a very dedicated engineer, very academically rigorous.

And I always think as a business person, the 80% solution, usually in a business environment, 80% solutions, a pretty good one. We didn’t have an operator’s manual. We wrote one. Is it perfect? No, but it’s probably 80% right.

It’s better than nothing, right? So for whatever, whatever that is, when it comes to developing new technologies and the design and engineering of products, you need to have a little more rigor. And Ivan is the guy who gets to 99.5% and he knows where the other 0.5%, what the risks are and what the issues are before he pulls the trigger on something.

Kwin Peterson: 15:19

Are you part of your job training in Ivan to say, you know Ivan it’s good. Good enough or are you sometimes Ivan going to solve that last point.

Alex Churchill: 15:28

Yeah, yeah, Yeah. And I think he’s been a very intellectually curious person. So, you know, we’ve spent many focused years of, of his time and effort and I’ll say blood, sweat and tears trying to further the space that we’re in and we’ve spent, I would say, in the last 3 or 4 years, significantly over $1 million just on R&D. And we’re a pretty small company. So it’s a big investment and we’re the only people doing what we do.

And so when we want to do something different or we want to improve our product, there’s nowhere else to turn other than R&D and playing around in a lab environment and trying to figure out what can work, what can’t work, how accurate or precise can this be? How what? What is accurate and precise enough? What else can we do? Those kinds of things.

So. Like I said before, Manufacturing’s always interested me because there’s so many nuances and so many, so many little details and things that you don’t get into until you try to try to make something and create something.

Kwin Peterson: 16:43

So let’s talk about those early days at InfoSense. There really wasn’t a smart sewer at the time. We were starting to get just some first inklings of sensors in the sewer, but then we talked last week on the podcast with Nate Denney from twin D, who, by the way, did a shout out to the acoustic assessment and the SL rat. So I’m glad we got to have this conversation. Yeah thanks, Nate.

But he was talking about those days in the early 2000. And they’re just we had the big jump as we’re going to go to an HD sewer camera. How was it like entering this world as a pioneer of this idea that technology actually belongs in sewer pipes?

Alex Churchill: 17:35

I don’t know that we were seeing ourselves as part of this vanguard. There were some other companies that were on the scene at the time, ones I can think of that we looked up to. We were trying to figure out, how are we going to sell this idea, how are we going to market it? What sales channel are we going to use? Who are we trying to talk to?

Who are we trying to partner with? Who, who may be a competitor and who may be a complementary product? There were several. Electro Scan was coming out, came out just a little bit before our product, Red Zone, was making a big push with their, you know, like you said, HD cameras and the stuff they were doing, the Hawke flow meter, which is now a micrometer. But the Hawke floater product was an open channel flow meter that was revolutionary in that time frame.

And the smart cover was, I think, just coming on the scene. So those were the other companies that we looked at. There were some other ones. I remember us looking at a company called Takeda in Israel, which is doing some other stuff now. So it’s kind of interesting to see everybody that we looked at, to figure out what to do or what they were doing and to try to learn what we could take from their product introduction experiences.

It still seems to be out there. So there’s certainly more profusion of technology. And I think some of the things when we first started, almost no utility we worked with had GIS. If they did have GIS, the common refrain was yes, we have GIS, but it’s so inaccurate, it’s so blah blah blah that we don’t use it or we can’t rely on it or what have you. Most of them did not have some sort of work order management or asset management system or tools, regardless of the size some of the bigger ones had had, I’d say repurposed some other industrial cmms tools and things like that, like Maximo from IBM and some of those kinds of products.

But they’re really a lot of the back end, IT infrastructure and tools. Just most utilities were on paper and on paper on Excel spreadsheets or tribal knowledge. And somebody had yeah.

Kwin Peterson: 20:11

There’s a lot of that. So that’s interesting. You have one product at InfoSense. Well you, you basically have one product. We’ve got the SL rat, and that has gone through changes over the years.

Under your leadership, I’m sure that you’ve made a number of changes both to the manufacturing and to the tool itself. I know one of those was the addition of GPS. When did that happen and what drove the inclusion of GPS units in the SL rat?

Alex Churchill: 20:43

Yeah, I would say the product leadership side has largely been driven by Ivan. He’s really been at the forefront of all of all of our design work. To answer the question on GPS, we implemented GPS from what I would say is the third generation product. So if we back up, there was a proof of concept device that Ivan sold to the city of Charlotte, and it was composed of some PVC pipes that were glued together and some parts and pieces. And it was definitely not a field tool, and that was used to prove that the concept of yelling and listening in the pipe could work.

And then Ivan sold the city of Charlotte for what we call a beta prototype. So they were if you saw them, you would see. And they were in our shop. He wanted to throw them away, but we’ve we’ve we’ve saved them.

Kwin Peterson: 21:40

They’re going to have a museum of rats.

Alex Churchill: 21:42

Yes. And they look like you can see if you look at them. Yeah. It looks very similar to the current SL rat device. It has a frame.

It’s got a speaker, it’s got a microphone. It’s got some sort of box with electronics in it, a bit cruder than what we have now. But that’s where the base concept came from. And that was kind of our minimum viable product. But that first product did not have the two of the major issues it had was it didn’t have GPS.

And so when our customers went out to use the equipment, they didn’t know which pipe they had used it on. And so that was a big thing that we realized very early on, is that registering the test record to the correct asset seems trivial, but it’s not at all. It’s very hard. And if you get the wrong test associated with the wrong pipe, that’s just bad information and you’re not going to make good decisions off of that. So that was early on.

We implemented a GPS chip in the unit. The other two other major issues that we had. One is that the speakers that we used, speakers aren’t really designed for sewer crews to work with. And we made some major effort to develop a speaker that was rugged enough that it could be used in the field like ours is. So that was an early on improvement and then the battery.

The first units we don’t take are the battery in our cell phone for granted today. But if you look back, even 15 years ago, this didn’t exist in this form factor with these capabilities. And so finding a battery that would, would, could power the electronics, power, power, the equipment was was a real challenge. And the original unit, the battery, was a prototype battery. It wasn’t really something that you could use in production.

And so those were the three major changes that went into the version that most people are familiar with now. And if you look at the first units that were built in 2012, built by hand in Ivan’s garage with Dremel tools and things, before we went to using machine shops and things. Those units look very similar to what we have out there now. We’ve had a lot of continuous improvements, but a lot of them have been subtle and obvious to us as the manufacturer, but maybe not obvious to the end user unless they really knew what they were looking for.

Kwin Peterson: 24:25

I’ve used unit number 441 I think, and I currently have in my car units 1440 something. Anyway, I haven’t noticed any difference between those two units, so it’s remarkable. Where do you manufacture your products?

Alex Churchill: 24:44

So we do. We manufacture them in Charlotte at our headquarters where I’m sitting right now, and we have a team of folks in the back that do the final assembly, maintenance, and repair. All that stuff is done here, here in our shop in Charlotte. And we’ve got a lot of infrastructure that we’ve built over the time, a lot of it is very specialized to be able to analyze the circuit boards and analyze the signal. There’s a lot of a lot of the challenges, the analog to digital and digital to analog conversions and how that stuff is done.

And although devices, if somebody used it, it’s very rugged as we know, they get banged around out in the field all day, but they’re measuring down to the millionth of a volt on the receiver. So there’s some very sophisticated electronics in there, even though to the end user it may not, you may not be feeling like you’re flying an F-35 fighter jet or something. But there’s some pretty, pretty impressive electronics in there that make it work.

Kwin Peterson: 25:54

I’m sure that I really enjoy working with that level of precision he has.

Alex Churchill: 26:01

Yeah.

Kwin Peterson: 26:02

What? Tell me about the moment. Was there a moment in the history of the company where it was a turning point or maybe the way you phrase it is this. Is there a moment when you knew this is going to change the industry?

Alex Churchill: 26:18

I would love to say that there was just this, you know, ray of sunshine that came down and shone upon our faces and we said, the time is here. But it was a very gradual experience, I would say more like the morning fog lifting. It happens slowly. And over time your things become clearer and clearer and you get a better picture of the world. And maybe that’s why they called it the fog of war.

You know, we were we were we were busy doing a lot of things and trying to build this company. But we weren’t. We had so many things to focus on. There, there wasn’t any particular exact moment, I will say, you know, one of the things I remember somewhat clearly is after we’d moved to our second office, and I guess I’ll start off with when we moved to an office and we stopped working in our houses, that was a big change that we had an office to go to in a warehouse where we were shipping parts to and all that kind of stuff. But I definitely remember being with Ivan and our old partner George, that that was involved with the company for a long time, and we were in our, in our current facility, and we had three employees sitting at the conference room table and they were having a meeting, and we all looked at each other and said, we have no idea what they’re what they’re meeting about.

And like, wow, this is a real company. Like we’re either not, it’s developed a life of its own. And there are other people involved in this organism. It’s not just the 2 or 3 of us.

Kwin Peterson: 28:04

Well, our company, RH Borden. This is one of our flagship services. We use your tool, the SL rat, to do over 1,000,000ft of pipe in the average month assessing pipe. And so it has made our business possible. It’s made it possible for us to serve over 200 systems across the country.

We’re just superfans and really love it. I am interested in hearing your bigger picture. First of all, you said, is Charlotte a one off? Is it like other ones in the country? Is it like everybody else in the world?

What does the SL rat look like on a national or international? From an international view? I understand people are using it all over the world. Where can you tell us about that? People are using it.

Maybe we would be surprised about it.

Alex Churchill: 29:00

Yeah. So I guess there’s a couple questions in there. I would say one of the things that we learned relatively early on is we traveled to every continent but Antarctica. Showing people this technology. And one of the things that we learned is this is largely a first world product.

And so second world country, third world countries generally don’t have any sewer infrastructure for the most part. Second world countries in general have a lot bigger issues than sewer overflows. And sewer maintenance is just a reality of, of the economics of their situation. And so this is although something useful, not always something that they have the resources to prioritize doing. So we found a really first world or developed world product as far as customers.

We have customers on every continent except Antarctica. I don’t think there’s any. I don’t know if there’s any sewers there, but we’ve worked with utilities from Saudi Arabia to Uzbekistan to Romania, France, Italy, you know, the countries you would expect. And I would say that about 90% of our business is in North America. That’s traditionally been where we’ve been, and that’s the US and Canada, where we have a lot of customers that we love up in Canada, many of which we’ve been working with for many years.

We work with almost every major Canadian city in some form or fashion, and a lot of smaller ones. We’re doing some stuff in South America right now with partners down there. About a quarter of the population of Chile is being supported by an entity from Santiago that is doing a service, sewer maintenance, sewer service work there. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is a new customer we picked up last year. So we’ve got customers all over the world.

But really it’s a first world product to have to, to worry about maintaining your sewers unfortunately. But that’s, that’s the way the world is.

Kwin Peterson: 31:23

Yeah. Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit a couple more questions before we wrap up. You talked about large cities. Obviously large cities have the resources to do pretty much anything they want.

What is a good use case that you can share for us from a large city. And then I will challenge you on who you think the smallest city that’s using this is? But I think you probably have more knowledge of, of larger or larger cities than I do, because just the experience I’ve had. Thus a large city using it and how are they doing with it?

Alex Churchill: 32:00

So I can think of quite a few large cities. Saint Louis. MSD, one of the largest utilities in the US, Charlotte Water is similarly sized on the order of 4 or 5000 miles of, or 6000 plus kilometers of sewer per system. Those are two big ones in the US I can think of. We also work with the city of Toronto in Canada.

They’ve been a user for a long time. And then I mentioned Santiago, Chile, the huge system down there, several thousand kilometers of sewer pipe. And Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is a very large city. We’ve also worked with Singapore’s Public Utilities Board. And you know, there’s I’m sure there’s other ones that I’m missing or forgetting.

I think some kind of pivoting off of that. I think some of the key utilities that helped us. Showing what the operating model was for mid or large sized utilities are Augusta, Richmond, a city of Augusta, Georgia, and Richmond County. There they were early pioneers with us of not necessarily the technology but of how to implement it in a system wide programmatic fashion that they were really the first to do that and screen their entire sewer system in a, you know, 1 to 2 year period. Little Rock, Arkansas is another one that we’ve worked with for many years.

And they’re big users. They screen their whole 1200 ish mile sewer system on a 12 to 18 month basis using our equipment. And so. That’s kind of what we’ve seen. But you know, you mentioned small.

There’s well before we jump off. Yeah, yeah. Anyone who has a sewer system, I think that a separated sanitary system with pipes that are 6 to 18 inch in diameter can benefit from this.

Kwin Peterson: 34:08

Yeah.

During my time in Colorado, I had a lot of small, very small. Some in some cases very small systems that successfully and enthusiastically used the rat. The smallest one I can think of is in. It’s a small sanitary district in Cherry Hills. Cherry Creek, excuse me.

Colorado, that has 4267ft of pipe, a total of 21 manholes. And every year they have us come out and rat their system. In my mind, the argument for using it in a small system is dead simple. They don’t have the resources to have guys out with trucks. I’ve always been a little fascinated with the larger cities that are not using it.

What do you think? What advice would you give to somebody who is in a large city with a thousand miles of pipe or more and is thinking about, is this a tool for me? I’ve heard of other cities that are using it or aren’t using it. What should I be thinking about when I move to something like the acoustic assessment with the SRT?

Alex Churchill: 35:16

Yeah, that’s a great question, Kwin. I would say from my experience doing this for 14 years that we’ve worked with a lot of large utilities. I didn’t mention all of them, but I mentioned a sampling. We’ve also had some that have where their implementations have failed and others less common in larger utilities and less common in smaller utilities. And I would say the key thing that I have seen is that you have to have a senior level sponsor of some kind, an executive level champion that says, we’re going to do this.

The larger the utility, the more silos, the more departments, the more vested interests, the more this changes how everybody does their job. And there has to be someone there pushing to, to, to to make people change to, to embrace this technology. And that that’s that’s what I would say if you’re going to do this in a larger utility that has, you know, significant management infrastructure, you need someone at the director, deputy director level to to be able to not necessarily run the program on a day to day basis, but to be an executive sponsor to get it, to get it implemented.

Kwin Peterson: 36:35

That makes so much sense. And, you know, a lot of these cities, all these cities have some sort of change management department. And it’s in my experience that has been absolutely key to getting this happening because you think about it, you know, oh, we’re going to go out and we’re going to know which pipes need to be cleaned and which ones aren’t. Well, there’s a whole bunch of both upstream and downstream things that happen when you change this one piece of it. I have just run into a city.

And I’ll share this one just with some people who are going to have this issue where it died, because the union leadership in this particular city did not want their workers to be as accountable as the SL rat makes them, because with the SL rat, you can measure production down to the foot every day. And bosses love it. Not everybody else does. Things like that have to be to work through a change.

Alex Churchill: 37:31

And that’s a great point. Quindio, along with the SL rat, have a product called the Sewer Line Data Organizer. Think of the SL rat like the iPhone and the SL dog sewer line data organizer cloud platform like your iCloud. So we have an analogous analogy to the iPhone and the iCloud and our version of the iCloud. You can pull out whatever data you want.

You can measure operator productivity by the hour. You can measure down to the foot, you have GPS data, you can do all kinds of things. And we thought this was amazing. And when we rolled it out, we found a lot of utilities that didn’t embrace it and didn’t want to use it. And part of it was, like you said, the accountability piece that somebody has to be accountable for.

Why did somebody do this much production per hour? And I have seen our and you guys have more data than we do, but our field crews average somewhere between 10 and 20,000ft of pipe per day that they’re screening, depending on the topography and how hard manholes are to find and the weather and all that kind of stuff. But I’ve seen utilities that are doing a 10th to a 20th that with their field crews and you can look at the timestamps. It’s pretty obvious that that stuff’s not getting done. But people have to be held accountable.

And that’s just basic management leadership.

Kwin Peterson: 38:58

Yeah. You know, it’s been fascinating to roll out to different cities and see the different desires for this level of accountability. My favorite story in all of history came from a city where they, their public works, went from being shunned and mistrusted by their city council to being able to come with this data and say, here is the exact footage of a pipe that needs to be cleaned. This is exactly how many crew days we’re going to need to do it. This is exactly how many crew people will need this, or their operator hours that are going to be required to do this maintenance to fix this problem, and having the city council go from we don’t believe anything you say to.

What do you need? And to that, that’s the flip side of it. And it makes me.

Alex Churchill: 39:49

That’s lifting the.

Kwin Peterson: 39:49

Fog.

Alex Churchill: 39:50

We’re lifting the fog and we’re looking for needles in haystacks. And I mentioned the 80 over 20 rule at the beginning. That, you know, 80% of the 80% solution is kind of similar to the 80 over 20 rule. And what we’ve seen over and over again is that when I look at your sewer system, if you have a hundred miles of sewer, somewhere between 10 and 20 miles of that probably needs some form of maintenance, but the other 80 to 90 miles does not from from a from a cleaning standpoint, I’m not saying you don’t want to CCTV it and and find structural defects and other things, but from just a general cleaning routine maintenance standpoint over and over and over again, 80 to 90% of your system doesn’t need to be clean. So I tell people, if you’re cleaning your system on a time based rotational program, I can tell you statistically at least $0.70 and more likely, $0.90 of every dollar you’re spending is being wasted cleaning pipes that are already clean.

Kwin Peterson: 40:59

Yeah, it’s a great message. And it’s typical of all of the impact that a lot of this technology that’s coming into our system has. One of my guests earlier said, if you’re coming into a wastewater system and you don’t know what’s going on, your first lesson you need to take away is that technology is going to be your friend. Well, I have one last question, and before I ask it, I want to point people to your website, which is WW. The last question I’ve got for you is info that helped invent the smart sewer and you, Alex, are at every single conference.

What do you see coming down the road in the wastewater infrastructure? Or another question, what would you hope for?

Alex Churchill: 41:49

I think yeah, a few things. So I think at this point in time, there’s just amazing, amazing technologies that are out there at economical prices. And so things that didn’t used to be viable, you know, I think of level only flow meters. I think of GIS systems, I think of manhole modeling and laser profiling and all these kinds of new technologies that are out there that generate huge amounts of data. But now we have the back end infrastructure to process that data and to be able to help utility leaders, kind of teasing the needle out of the haystack.

And we’ve gotten very good at building the haystack because we can get you a huge amount of data. But I think we’re getting better now at helping filter down to where the where’s the needle? What do I need to focus on? And that’s what I think we’re going to see, I would say sensor diffusion. You know, we’re going to see more and more as things become cheaper, they get used more, they become more viable, and they make more sense.

You know, if a sensor costs $1 million, a utility can probably not buy one. If it costs $100, all utilities could buy, you know, at least one, maybe tens of thousands. And so I think we’ll see more of that sensor diffusion or perfusion then that’s going to generate more data. And we have the back end infrastructure to process that now and then. What I’m hoping is that as utility leaders see these case studies and see the things that other utilities have been able to achieve, that we see a more widespread implementation and embrace of new technologies in our space.

Kwin Peterson: 43:56

All right. Well, we’ve been talking with Alex Churchill, who is the CEO and co-owner of InfoSense. Alex, where can people learn more about you and the company?

Alex Churchill: 44:07

So they can email us about sales at infosense. com. They can also go to our website ww.com. Or they can call us at (704) 644-1164. Any one of those are ways that they can get in touch with someone and get a demo of the product or get a chance to meet with somebody who’s a product expert that can help them understand how it could be used in their system.

Kwin Peterson: 44:42

Yeah. I can also tell you, if you’re planning on going to a conference, you have a very good chance of running into Alex as well. Alex, thank you for taking the time to talk with me today on the podcast. Thank you also for creating and manufacturing and pushing out into the world such an amazing device. I really appreciate it.

Alex Churchill: 45:03

And Kwin, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate you thinking of me as an OG in the industry.

Kwin Peterson: 45:10

Well, I call him as I see him, but have a great day and for all of you listening, don’t forget to click and subscribe and we will see you next week.

Outro: 45:22

Thanks for listening to the Saving Our Sewers podcast. We’ll be back next time with more insights you can use. Be sure to click and subscribe to get future episodes.