How IoT can help us save water

More than 50 per cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion will be liv­ing in water-stressed regions by 2050, accord­ing to the Unit­ed Nations. It’s there­fore vital we reduce the 126 mil­lion cubic metres of water lost annu­al­ly due to leaks, poor meter­ing and theft, and not just for the good of the plan­et.

The cost of lost water amounts to $39 bil­lion (£29 bil­lion) a year. Mean­while, con­sumers want busi­ness­es to do more than pay lip ser­vice to envi­ron­men­tal issues. They expect to see real evi­dence of how com­pa­nies are reduc­ing their impact on the planet’s resources, includ­ing their approach to water man­age­ment.

It’s an issue that’s par­tic­u­lar­ly per­ti­nent for water-inten­sive indus­tries such as man­u­fac­tur­ing and agri­cul­ture, which use large amounts of water to pro­duce cars, cloth­ing, crops and oth­er vital goods. But thank­ful­ly there’s a solu­tion.

Creating smarter water systems

Smart water sys­tems based on inter­net of things (IoT) sen­sors, big data and ana­lyt­ics can reduce the amount of water that’s wast­ed dur­ing agri­cul­tur­al and man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es, improve the effi­cien­cy of water dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tems and alert com­pa­nies if tox­ins or oth­er impu­ri­ties are detect­ed.

“Advances in IoT sen­sors, com­mu­ni­ca­tions and cloud com­put­ing have dra­mat­i­cal­ly low­ered the cost of gath­er­ing, stor­ing and analysing data, whether this is from spe­cif­ic equip­ment, like pumps or valves, or entire process­es like water treat­ment or irri­ga­tion,” explains Joseph Vesey, chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer at Xylem, which cre­ates smart tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions to meet water and ener­gy needs.

“They allow us to go beyond basic mon­i­tor­ing to effi­cient­ly access new types of data, at a lev­el of gran­u­lar­i­ty that wasn’t cost effec­tive in the past, espe­cial­ly for small and medi­um-sized organ­i­sa­tions.”

In short, util­i­ties, farm­ers and man­u­fac­tur­ers of all sizes can use IoT tech­nolo­gies to improve their water man­age­ment process­es. Sen­sors can mon­i­tor tank fill­ing lev­els, for instance, as well as con­trol the qual­i­ty of water used in man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es and detect leaks.

Bet­ter man­age­ment of the water sys­tem means “ener­gy is also reduced when leaks are erad­i­cat­ed, as the ener­gy to treat and pump leaked water is no longer required”, says Nigel Harley, IoT sales spe­cial­ist with the Inter­net of Things Cen­tre of Excel­lence team at Soft­ware AG, which pro­vides plat­form inte­gra­tion and IoT for enter­pris­es.

“In agri­cul­ture, the use of soil mois­ture sen­sors can increase yields by apply­ing just the right amount of water to sat­is­fy plant needs and not sat­u­rat­ing the root sys­tem,” says Lau­rie Reynolds, man­ag­ing direc­tor of Aqua­matiX, a soft­ware com­pa­ny that spe­cialis­es IoT solu­tions for water and waste­water infra­struc­ture. “The amount of water to achieve ide­al grow­ing con­di­tions can be var­ied dur­ing the grow­ing sea­son.”

IoT makes scaling up operations possible

Due to the size of many water com­pa­ny net­works and the fact that their pumps and treat­ment equip­ment are often spread out over large areas, IoT offers an oppor­tu­ni­ty to gath­er data for water man­age­ment on a far larg­er scale than was pre­vi­ous­ly pos­si­ble.

“While it’s prac­ti­cal­ly impos­si­ble to install enough sen­sors to mea­sure water qual­i­ty changes every­where in a net­work, IoT helps by pre­sent­ing us with the big­ger pic­ture,” says Vesey. “It can inter­con­nect a small­er num­ber of sen­sors — ones that mea­sure flow, pres­sure, water lev­el and water qual­i­ty — and link them togeth­er with mod­els to ‘fill in the gaps’ and pro­vide a com­plete pic­ture of water qual­i­ty changes across the entire sys­tem.”

Using IoT across water net­works in this way allows oper­a­tors to make bet­ter deci­sions about water man­age­ment, and even auto­mate deci­sion-mak­ing to respond to demands in real time, includ­ing when and how to oper­ate treat­ment plants, pumps and valves.

“In addi­tion to pro­vid­ing pre­ci­sion, this tech­nol­o­gy elim­i­nates many pro­ce­dures that, until now, have been car­ried out man­u­al­ly,” says Ali­cia Asín, co-founder and chief exec­u­tive of Libeli­um, which designs and man­u­fac­tur­ers IoT solu­tions. She adds that this not only saves mon­ey, it means staff can be reas­signed to oth­er tasks, adding val­ue to the busi­ness.

Reducing leakage is a top priority

SES Water, which pro­vides water in Sut­ton and East Sur­rey, has been work­ing with a num­ber of its key sup­ply chain part­ners to tri­al a range of spe­cial­ist dig­i­tal water meters, sen­sors and acoustic log­gers on under­ground mains water pipes, which are con­nect­ed using Vodafone’s nar­row­band IoT (NB-IoT) net­work.

“These part­ner­ships we have devel­oped are help­ing us cre­ate an intel­li­gent water dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work that aims to cut leak­age by 15 per cent over the next five years and pro­vide a bet­ter, more resilient ser­vice to our cus­tomers,” says Daniel Wood­worth, net­work strat­e­gy man­ag­er at SES Water.

The water com­pa­ny is get­ting near real-time data from the sen­sors, and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and machine-learn­ing alerts them imme­di­ate­ly to leaks, low pres­sure or oth­er sup­ply inter­rup­tions. “As a result we can be made aware of any leak­age occur­ring on our cus­tomers’ pipework, allow­ing us to pin­point the pre­cise loca­tion before it can cause any dam­age to prop­er­ty, the envi­ron­ment or an inter­rup­tion to sup­ply,” says Wood­worth.

After see­ing sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits of mov­ing to NB-IoT, SES Water has now begun a full com­pa­ny-wide roll­out of the tech­nol­o­gy. In future, it could even enable the water provider to pre­dict and pre­vent pipeline fail­ure before it hap­pens.

What­ev­er the indus­try, Rik Gun­der­son, util­i­ty client direc­tor at Soft­ware AG, says there are ulti­mate­ly three ele­ments to improv­ing water man­age­ment and reduc­ing wastage: cap­tur­ing the data, analysing that data and using these insights to dri­ve a busi­ness out­come. “The hard­est part in any indus­try is the abil­i­ty to access the data, make both it and the result­ing ana­lyt­ics eas­i­ly acces­si­ble yet secure, and to have the busi­ness fore­sight to use the data in a way that dri­ves deci­sions,” he says. While this might be a chal­lenge in some instances, the results, both envi­ron­men­tal­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly, seem well worth the effort.