IoT Smart Water: A Big Technological splash

“The UN reports that by 2025, approximately 1.8 billion people worldwide will be living in areas of absolute water scarcity.”

With the present water scenario, the U.S. government, over the next 20 years, will spend almost $4 billion on rebuilding and upgrading the existing infrastructure.

As only 1% of the planet’s fresh water is available to end users and most people suffer from draught. To end this scarcity and prevent a disaster, a skyrocket technology is much needed.

There are four main area of focus while monitoring water: Quality of drinking water, environment policy, EU Policy and economic regulations- all these aim for better optimization and innovation.

And they create a great sense of urgency for innovation!!

A disruptive technology, Internet of Things (IoT), has acknowledged this problem and IoT vendors came up with extraordinary solutions. In the USA, almost 15% of Californian households has employed Smart Water Flow Meter (It is an IoT based gadget that tracks water consumption and sends the ingested data to cloud for further analysis).

IoT water solutions ensures a precise control over the data ingested from the water resources which allows an efficient and optimized management of water. IoT smart water management has put a significant impact on the cost of the water distribution, forming a cost-efficient urban water distribution. Especially the agriculture sector is reaping the most of the IoT advantages in water management.

FEATURES OF IoT SMART WATER:

1. Pipeline Monitoring

Pipe bursts usually occur due to following reasons

1. Frozen pipes
2. Excessive weight
3. Water pressure
4. Corrosion

Due to increasing pipeline damage in water management system, a real-time monitoring of the pipeline was a necessity. With the advent of cheap and low-cost sensors, IoT Water prevents frozen and leaky pipe bursts and hence monitors the pipeline.

Not only this but the sensors used sends the alerts about temperature and leakage and hence prevents the pipeline from the threshold value of bursting.

2. Cost-Efficient

With the emergence of low-cost, low energy consuming sensors in IoT Water, assets can be connected to one another and can be monitored in real-time, even in the remote areas. Tracking the health of assets like a pipeline, pumps etc. has become easy and also it became easy to know that where and which asset in the complete water management system needs maintenance or replacement well before time by sending alerts.

3. Water Quality Monitoring

IoT sensor, embedded in the IoT solutions, ease the water quality monitoring. Embedded with multiple sensors that measure most of the water quality parameters, IoT Water is the most trusted water quality sensing solutios which gets connected to the cloud for real-time monitoring. Water Quality Parameters like pH, dissolved oxygen (DO), oxidation-reduction potential, salinity measuring, conductivity measuring and TDS measuring are some of the common key criteria that are looked after with the IoT Smart Water Management.

4. Preventive Maintenance

It is better to be preventive than reactive, IoT Water helps in the preventive maintenance of the pipes-whether they are above the ground or below the ground. A huge amount of data is collected from the sensors and then communicated to the cloud, further is is sent to the respective administrator to act before any disruption occurs.

Business Benefits with IoT in Water

The demand for IoT Smart Water Management has enabled the efficient use of available water resources and due to which, some of the famous analysts estimated that global water sector to be worth 1 trillion USD per year by 2025. Let’s see how IoT Water has hovered over the water management systems, which have implemented IoT technology, and changed everything –

1. Increased productivity and efficiency

The smart business decisions and real-time control by adopting IoT Water, have reduced the operational cost and optimized the processes and resources. Undoubtedly, IoT Water has expanded many business models and has generated newbies too, hence generating more profits day by day. Not only this, but many water management companies use real-time operational control system which increases the efficiency.

2. Reduced costs and increase in revenue

The real-time monitoring of the entire water system like leakage detection, pressure sensing, pipeline monitoring, pump station monitoring etc. consequently results in optimized asset utilization, improved operational processes and lower maintenance, infrastructure costs. The major challenge in water management system is the cost of the moving water, which is huge.IoT smart water management has reduced the unnecessary mobilization of the water which in turn has made the smart water management system much more cost-efficient.

3. Improvement in safety and reliability of network operations

Few of the system maintenance studies claim that maintenance activities are carried out very frequently in water management system and among those around 45% of total effort is ineffective and may lead to asset failure.IoT Water has a unique feature of predictive maintenance which fetches the data from the sensors and predict when an asset is going to need maintenance to eliminate the breakdown by approx. 70%, reduce downtime by 50% and reduce scheduled repairs by 12%.

CONCLUSION:

Earlier conventional techniques of conservation were used to conserve water but the right apparatus leveraging IoT technology is the reply to get water conservation to a new level. IoT technology will enable smart water meters, detectors, and irrigation methods to be deployed in home, farms, and water distribution systems. The demand for advanced solutions to enable more efficient utilization of water sources, enhance drinking water quality, and enhance water resource planning is increasing and the IoT came as a disruption in the water management.

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