Smart water metering raises awareness for better water management
by Water Source
WaterGroup has joined forces with Australia’s leading network provider to revolutionise water management using the Internet of Things (IoT).
Australia’s water systems supply almost two billion cubic metres of potable water each year, with up to 240 million cubic metres lost to leaks and unaccounted water use. Smart water metering can play a major role in solving this problem.
“With real-time monitoring of water flow, pressure and quality, as well as data collected from smart meters, any water network owner/operator will be able to identify and respond to issues such as water loss through leaks or other unaccounted use of water,” said Guenter Hauber-Davidson, Managing Director of WaterGroup.
In the last financial year, smart metering systems saved 300ML and $1 million for WaterGroup’s clients.
Recently, WaterGroup partnered with Thinxtra to expand access to smart water metering for utility companies, councils, schools and aged care facilities all across the country via the Sigfox network.
Sigfox is the largest network in the world specifically designed to connect the millions of devices that are part of the IoT, with coverage of over 71% of Australia and projected coverage of 90% by the end of the year.
Smart water meters equipped with Sigfox communications securely send small data packets in real-time, with minimal power usage, at a very low cost.
WaterGroup is also collaborating with Reekoh to enable full interoperability between data produced from their smart water meters and their clients’ own data, workflow and management systems.
“Reekoh is an extremely versatile IoT platform with hundreds of interoperability plug-ins available for tools such as Microsoft Power BI, Envizi, HydraCommunity, Amazon Web Servers, SAP and much more,” said Hauber-Davidson.
“It allows the connecting of just about any device to just about any platform without coding and just like a web-based configuration tool.”
This collaboration negates challenges of scalability, data integration, data management and unexpected costs faced by large water users.
“As costs come down and as the benefits of smart meters go up, we expect them to be used by just about anybody and everybody within the next 10 years.” said Hauber-Davidson.
Related podcast:
https://omny.fm/shows/australianwater/kylie-rogers-on-mackay-smart-sewers
