IoT in Water

The Internet of Things offers new solutions for improving water management, to maximize efficient use of this precious resource. Comprehensive water management strategies can reduce water costs by up to 20%.

Water projects can be particularly complex since many cities rely on aging infrastructure, and the IoT also presents opportunities for municipalities to reduce operational expenses around construction, maintenance, and more.

Whilst traditional major infrastructure assets such as trunk mains, pumps or reservoirs have been instrumented for years using systems such as SCADA, the vast majority of the reticulation network – the final pipe network that delivers water to a customer’s premises – has always been “dark” to the utility. That is, utilities rely almost exclusively on the customer acting as their sensor when there’s a fault, the customer phones up to complain.

The potential of sensors

With IoT sensors offering a substantially cheaper price point and with new, battery powered networking solutions like LORA becoming available, the price barrier is significantly reduced. Lower prices on tech solutions allow the utility to “light up” more of their network, thereby both improving customer experience as well as reducing costs in operations and maintenance.

Want to know more? Read here the full article on IBM’s site.