South West Water trialED internet-of-things enabled smart water meters as a way of providing customers with information about how a water meter can save them money, reduce water use and help tackle leakage.
South West Water worked with these customers and their insurance providers to repair these leaks in a much quicker timeframe than if the leaks had been identified through non-IoT enabled Smart Meters. These quick fixes prevented higher bills and potential property damage from occurring.
Further data analysis identified smaller less significant leaks at 22% of the properties. These leaks are simple things like dripping taps – or in one instance, a fridge cold water dispenser that was leaking. Again, South West Water have been working with each of these customers to repair these leaks and to fit other water efficient devices across their homes.
We worked with South West Water as their communications partner to connect homes in the rural location of Torrington, Devon. Smart meters were connected wirelessly over Sigfox IoT with the data then analysed in ‘PROG’, B4T’s software platform. The connectivity rates of this trial have been 98.9%, even from challenging underground meter chambers, demonstrating that this type of technology could be suitable to wider roll-out.
“It is impressive that these IoT devices can notify us of small leaks at customers properties. How we action these insights and provide the right support to customers to make their homes more water efficiency will be critical to meeting the leakage challenge we face in AMP7. Fixing these leaks and making homes more water efficient is not only beneficial to South West Water, but it’ll help our customers make their bills more affordable as well”.
Dr Ben Ward, Drinking Water Asset Manager, South West Water
THE SMART THING WE DELIVERED
The PROG is an enterprise software system. It is a skeleton of robust software services connected to an industrial-grade data backbone.
The emmergence of IOT technology has created a storm of assumptions and myths. Our aim is to pull back the curtain and demonstrate the real world applications and opportunities IOT offers. What better way to do this than to bring our busines to the high street.
