Metering has been in place for quite some time. Usually, the municipal water you get to your building is metered and priced. Someone must manually read the data and compare it with the previously read data to compute the volume and hence the cost of water used.

However, this is a laborious process and hence the number of meters and the data received is limited. Reading are taken only every month or so. A smart water managementt system, in contrast can aggregate data at a more detailed level and provide real time feedback to the end-user.

How do smart meters work?

Smart flow sensors or meters are inserted into water pipes. Since no manual reading is needed, the meters can be inserted in branches which are not easily accessible for a detailed analysis of usage. These meter reading are transmitted to a gateway device either through wired or wireless connection. Gateway transmits data to a cloud server through a wireless network, where it is processed, and detailed analytics can be sent to your mobile phone or computer.

Benefits of Smart Metering

• Detect pipe leakages in real time - Algorithms can determine if there is a leaking pipe in the metered subunit.
• Equitable billing – In housing societies, a fair pricing can be arrived at depending on the usage of each unit even if there are multiple inlets into a single unit.
• Optimized water usage/Planning - Analytics allow people to effectively manage waste and plan for the water usage.
• Monitor hard-to-reach pipes and accurately detect and fix leakages before it leads to bigger problems like burst pipes, especially in underground pipes etc.