Smart Water Meters and Data Analytics Decrease Wasted Water Due to Leaks

Abstract

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) allows for hour-by-hour monitoring of water usage and has created new opportunities to communicate with customers. This article summarizes the results from a large-scale deployment of an AMI system with more than 85,000 residential customers. Households were provided with access to a secure customer online portal where they could view their consumption information, use a leak detection algorithm to monitor their consumption patterns, and set alerts when a potential leak was detected. Analyses showed that, subsequent to signup, households that accessed the customer portal were less likely to have a leak, and when a leak did occur, they repaired it more quickly, compared with similar households that did not sign up for online access. The results provide strong evidence for the value of leak detection analytics and alerts at minimizing water loss and damage due to leaks.Water leaks are of critical interest to both water utilities and consumers. Water leaks range from small losses, such as slow-dripping faucets (<1 gph) to moderate losses from sources like toilets or irrigation lines (~1-10 gph) to large leaks from broken pipes and water lines (upward of 100 gph). Water leaks can often go undetected for long periods of time, resulting in mounting damage and wasted water. Property damage and insurance claims resulting from water damage each year are considerable, and for water-stressed regions of the world, leaks represent a major source of wasted water.With regard to residential water consumption, the Water Research Foundation (2016) estimates that 12% of all indoor water use in the United States is lost to leaks. Smart water meters can monitor and detect leaks on the basis of anomalous flow patterns, especially continuous water flow. In instances in which water flows continuously over a 24 h period, there is a high probability of a leak. Alerting residents to possible leaks can potentially spur quicker repairs and result in reduced water loss and less property damage (Britton et al. 2013). However, to date, few systematic studies have directly tested strategies for communicating leak detection to residents.While an estimated 12% of water is lost to leaks, it is not clear how much of the water loss is due to small versus large leaks. Estimates for the number of residential accounts that have a leak vary widely and depend on the size of the leak threshold. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 10% of households have leaks of ≥90 gpd (≥3.75 gph; WaterSense 2017). For smaller leaks of <1 gph, estimates often exceed 50% of residential accounts. Water leaks also tend to follow seasonal trends, with higher leak rates during summer months, primarily associated with outdoor landscape irrigation. To aid in detection and repair, water utilities across the country typically conduct leak surveys to estimate water losses across their service territory, and many utilities provide their customers with free or discounted leak assessments. THE CURRENT STUDYThe current study repor...

Revealing Unreported Benefits of Digital Water Metering: Literature Review and Expert Opinions

“…Analysing the impact of customer access to an online portal by the City of Sacramento residents over an 18 month period, Schultz et al identified a 50% reduction in the occurrence of leaks (down from 12% to 6%) and a 34% reduction in the length of time to fix the leak [34].…”

Machine Learning and Data Analytic Techniques in Digital Water Metering: A Review

“…Real-time leak detection and alerts can lead to prompt repairs of leaks, thereby saving a substantial amount of water. To accomplish this task, many approaches have been employed [72][73][74][75][76]. Among these approaches, clustering techniques is the most popular for leak detection, followed by the hybrid approach (Table 4).…”

Smart water consumption measurement system for houses using IoT and cloud computing

“…Farah and Shahrour ( 2017 ) conducted a study, where an intelligent measurement system is implemented to detect possible leaks in a university campus, and it is proposed to combine the Water Balance rules with Minimum Night Flow (MNF), which results in 97% accuracy, thus, is achieved to reduce the waste of water by leakage. In the research article by Schultz et al ( 2018 ), a portal is implemented in a city of California where residents can monitor their water consumption; thus, for leak detection, it is proposed to establish based on an average (AVG) a limit (7.5 gph) of continuous water consumed during a 24-h period; likewise, its results show that users who used the system came to reduce by 50% the chances of having a leak again, but highlights that their methodology does not detect leaks less than the established limit. On the other hand, Farah and Shahrour ( 2018 ) demonstrated that using an automatic measurement system (AMR) for monitoring water been consumed, some water leakage can be detected quickly, for this they use a density probability function in order to identify regions of more or less probabilities of leakage based on data that was consumed before, during workdays, weekends, holidays, in this way, resulted they were able to detect 3 leaks in the Scientific Campus of the University of Lilledurante during 2015.…”

“…This generates a daily lack of knowledge of water consumption and the inability to detect in time a non-visible leak that results in a waste of this resource and economic losses even for the supplier when this resource is subsidized. An alternative to this problem is the use of smart systems that can save to generate water from 2.8 to 10.0% (Liu and Mukheibir 2018 ); this avoids wrong measurements generated by human error, and it creates the trust in consumers in terms of receipts and water consumption payments (Joo et al 2015 ), also it allows to report water leakage, which reduces the probability of reoccurrence by 50% (Schultz et al 2018 ). Currently, there are several smart measurement systems that also help detect, predict, and alert in time any leakage or excess of water.…”