Making Consumptions Dynamic & Water Balance Smarter
Many water utilities are rolling out smart meters with intra-day reading intervals to better understand demand in their water network. The benefits include helping customers to use less water, being able to quickly identify customer-side leaks and improving the accuracy of network leakage estimations.
As the coverage of smart meter data increases, so too do the range of analyses that can be applied to make the water balance smarter, e.g. smart meter consumptions and night use aggregated up to different area levels, as well as specific cohorts to simulate demand. This provides totalised area consumptions and customer side leakage, as well as intra-day demand profiles that can feed into the water balance analysis. The general idea of the smart water balance is to derive more representative consumption estimates, leveraging the smart meter data, the cohort analysis results of the smart meter data, as well as dynamic pressure adjustments.
Some key smart meter questions that need to be explored:
• What is the required level of smart metering to improve the accuracy of the water balance?
• What is the required frequency of data capture and retrieval to separate customer side leakage from network leakage?
Assuming these questions can be answered and the output from a cohort analysis can be confidently applied to simulate consumptions, the fundamental question remains: does the water balance continue to be a daily flow and night flow analysis, or do we move towards a mass balance using hourly/15min data?
Joseph Butterfield
