Smart water metering saves water and work

The Florenberg municipal waterworks near Fulda, Germany, has installed 4850 smart water meters, with the aim of making water operation more efficient and improving customer service.

The waterworks supplies approximately 20 000 customers with around 900 000 m³ of drinking water annually. The intelligent water meters will significantly lessen both the administrative and the operational work for both of the waterworks' technical engineers.

The time-consuming and cost-intensive reading of meters by external personnel immediately becomes a thing of the past and significantly shortens the end of year reporting.

Operations manager Stephan Hahn: "The challenge we face is that just a few employees

must tackle ever increasing numbers of tasks. The electronic water meters will provide us with a better and faster overview of our supply area. For instance, we will be able to localise pipe bursts more quickly and compile water loss analyses using our process control system. “

"Customers are becoming more and more sensitive when it comes to actual consumption," explains the technical operations manager. "Our daily work will be made significantly more straightforward, thanks to the high degree of accuracy displayed by the ultrasonic meter and the data logger. If required, it displays consumption over the last 460 days via direct

reading of the meter using a laptop, and the min and max alarms together with the other useful ancillary information which facilitates data storage."

The compact water meter measures consumption using an extremely precise ultrasonic principle. The data is cached by means of a built-in logger and the consumption data is accurately and efficiently read wirelessly by company personnel on target dates as they 'drive by', and then directly transmitted into the company's settlement system for further processing and invoicing. Consequently, the utility company is able to record up to 100% of water consumption in the supply area and error sources are almost zero.