Videographic recorders for the Glastonbury Festival in England

The Glastonbury Festival in southwest England is one of the world’s biggest and most popular open-air festivals for music and the performing arts. Held every year since 1970, the five-day festival takes place on a huge 10 sq km site and has a sellout attendance of 177,000 people a day.

Billed by its organizers as ‘the largest temporary performance site on Earth,’ this vast and sprawling tent and live entertainment complex requires extensive infrastructure to ensure that its city-size population is adequately provided with food, water, electric power, toilets and waste management facilities. 

More than 11 million liters of water are consumed over the five-day period for drinking, washing and showers. The water is supplied from two purpose-built underground reservoirs via a pipeline distribution network and some 700 hand basins and 100 standpipes.

Industry	Water and wastewater
Customer	The Glastonbury Festival
Country	England
Solutions	Essential Recorder Suite

The entire storage and distribution network is monitored by a sophisticated ABB water measurement solution comprising SM500F videographic recorders and WaterMaster electromagnetic flowmeter systems.

The solution enables the festival organizers to accurately monitor reservoir levels, flow rates and water consumption throughout the whole site - for the first time in the festival’s 41-year history.

It measures the flow rate of water pumped into the reservoirs and pipe system, correlates water supplied with utility billing, and provides a ‘footprint’ of consumption rates for any time period during the festival. Reservoir levels are monitored to provide an early warning of supply requirements and ensure dosing routes are in compliance and validate pump rates.

A second ABB multipoint videographic recorder solution (the award-winning SM3000) is recording energy parameters at the festival’s photovoltaic power plant. The 1,116 solar panels generate 200 kWh of clean power and contribute to the site’s energy requirements. The panels are located on the site’s cowshed, otherwise known as the ‘Mootel’.