It is a long way from the drinking water plant to the last customer‘s water tap. During this transportation, it is possible that the treated drinking water could get recontaminated in the water distribution system. To avoid recontamination of the treated drinking water, it is necessary to provide maintaince and service to the water distribution system including pipe lines on a regular basis.
Why water pipe needs to be clean?
To fight recontamination in the water distribution system, the common practice is disinfection. However, it is easy understand that the only best and effective way to avoid recontamination is to remove the source of pollution itself from the water distribution system totally.
This is why Water Regulations specifies cleaning and disinfection of water distribution as a standard maintaince procedure.
The different between newly installed and already existing pipe networks.
Effective pipe cleaning is the complete removal of contamination, sediments, deposits and unwanted materials in the pipe system. These substances are food and habitat which allows microorganism to grow and multiple. Effective cleaning of pipe system requires the loosen of sediments and deposits on the pipe surface. To avoid these sediments and deposit from resettling again in a different location we must make sure that they are removed totally from the water system. To do the cleaning properly, there is a need to distinguish the cleaning requirement between new pipe systems and existing pipe system.