Purpose Of An IoT-Based Smart Water Meter

By Sanjeev Verma

It is fascinating to see how the Internet of Things (IoT) is working in the water sector. Many countries are adopting smart meters for effective water utilization, and they further save cities against increasing water scarcity while setting permanent water-saving goals for consumers.

With the rise in urbanism, the demand for water consumption is increasing day-by-day, forcing water distributors to strive hard to meet those demands. Supplying water to every corner of the world and calculating water consumption is the biggest challenge in the water sector.

This article mainly focuses on defining the smart water meter and its beneficial impacts on the common people and industries. Let’s start with the basics.

What Is A Smart Water Meter?

How would you react to the situation when each drop of water consumed on your premises is being monitored? At the least, you’d feel grateful for the smart equipment, alerting you to save water every time you consume.

A smart water meter is nothing fancy; it is a normal device that wirelessly communicates with a local or wide area network, enabling remote location monitoring and leak detection, which results in minimal water wastage. Here are some benefits of a smart water meter:

• A smart water meter favors dynamic water billing, which eliminates the need for manual supervision every month in each household. It supports real-time web-based metering that helps provide live alerts about the leaks, water getting wasted, etc. A smart water meter also facilitates a two-way interaction among the water distributors and the consumers where the suppliers can track each house’s water consumption that come under the real-time networking range. It helps the authorities to automatically generate the bill and send them to all the consumers within the specified time.
• Adding a smart water meter solution helps identify consumption inefficiencies and patterns. These smart meters comprise an IoT platform suite, which tracks the amount of water consumed by each consumer regularly. The data collected through this IoT suite can be further monitored, and the users can know their regular habits of where they are utilizing the excess water. This results in harnessing the over-consumption or water wastage by incorporating necessary steps.
• Establishing a base to improve anything requires the knowledge of what is causing the challenges in abundance. Similarly, to bring down the excess water loss requires frequent evaluation of the consumption habits and knowing the places where over-consumption or spilling is taking place. Previously, the level of water loss was evaluated annually, and that too, when the customers used to send their readings. The development of a smart meter is constantly eradicating the traditional methods of evaluating water levels and is proving to be among the best innovations to save and conserve our water.
• Along with measuring the water, a smart water meter solution is scalable enough to monitor the pipeline temperatures. Along with water meters, temperature sensors can also be installed on the pipeline to identify the temperature in each asset and warn the customers by evaluating the risk of frost bursts. It would also alert about the higher temperatures in the distribution network due to stagnating water, which would minimize the growing risk of bacterial infections.

Saving Water Through IoT- Sustainable Future

Water is our most precious natural resource, which is used for various purposes. Hence, it becomes our duty to take care of it. Thinking about the future generation, they would definitely require water to sustain. Therefore, there is a need to put a full stop towards the reckless usage of water.

IoT is progressing in almost every industry, including the water sector. Saving water through IoT is a brilliant concept to merge technology and resource conservation. It requires an intelligent mind to make things work smartly and thus, the invention of smart water meters is the most appropriate method towards saving water through IoT. Here are some of the main features of a smart water meter.

• Real-time web-based monitoring
• Flexible billing cycle
• Data alerts of the non-revenue water
• Lots of savings
• Advanced data analytics

All these features together make an IoT smart water meter solution, which fights along with you against water wastage, excess consumption, and takes the responsibility to keep the water secured for future uses. If there's a flexible and automated billing cycle, you won't have to stand in queues for hours to pay the water bill. Plus, wouldn't it be beneficial for you to monitor the actual water consumption in your houses? A smart water meter is designed to save you from every possible way where you would waste water. Get started with a smart water meter solution and see the optimal results for yourself!

Sanjeev Verma is the founder and CEO of Biz4Group, based out of Orlando, FL. He has conceptualized the idea of Biz4 Brand and founded Biz4Group and Biz4Intellia. He has 20+ years of experience in boosting IT-based startups to success. In the past, he has worked on leadership positions with Marriott Vacations, Disney, MasterCard, Statefarm, and Oracle. The company headed by him excels in developing, implementing, and monitoring digital solutions ranging from IoT solutions and products, mobile and web development, and digital marketing to full stack development and CMS solutions.