Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). We'll take our first question from Mike Schneider with Robert W. Baird.
Mike Schneider - Robert W. Baird
I think the most encouraging aspect to me is the Fluid and Metering orders this quarter being down just 1% on a year-over-year, and when 3Q last year was a pretty good quarter. I realize energy which presumably is liquid controls and then the water businesses you mentioned are stronger, but, do you sense that this is more distributor-related, is it project-related, any color you can give us.
Then I guess presumably orders in Q4 are going to be positive, just again how sustainable this is and your gut feel for the underlying strength of the business, or indeed is it just unique projects coming through?
Larry Kingsley
Mike, it's a combination of the two. We did see a broad-based order bottoming certainly in the quarter and daily rates improved pretty nicely from the distribution base in the US and in Europe during the quarter. Some of the improvements though later in the quarter and orders did come from some of the larger projects that I spoke to, referred to anyway that came out of regions of the world that we haven't historically served.
Probably I want to think about those as not one-off because there's more to follow. Frankly, it comes down to the ability to serve some of these larger programs with the energy suite of products, the liquid control suite of products, which includes Toptech as you probably remember. Couple years ago we wouldn't have been under position either bid on some of these and frankly not only we successfully bid, but we're winning.
If you want to model it economically, I think you'd say that some of what you're seeing reflected in terms of organic orders in the quarter is, there's a decent, solid foundation, the process across the segment to the distribution base and the smaller OEM base, but some of the spikiness, the improvement we saw late in the quarter did come out as a specific projects and we think we'll see some more of those to follow as we move into new year.
Mike Schneider - Robert W. Baird
In the water projects that you've seen, are these domestic or European? Secondly, are these projects that you were in touch with already late last year that were shelved or indeed are these new [ROKs] coming out?
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