La Catalane des Eaux – Eau Agglo lifts its water management to new heights

In the dry part of southern France, the Perpignan region is persistently challenged by droughts and scarce water resources. Thus, La Catalane des Eaux - Eau Agglo, a company that is part of the Veolia Group and responsible for water management in the area, decided to replace the mechanical water meters with digital, ultrasonic meters with the aim of ensuring stable water supply and reducing water loss through digitalisation. La Catalane des Eaux - Eau Agglo opted for Kamstrup flowIQ® 2200 smart water meters.

By 2026, all households in the Perpignan area, a total of 120,000, will have digital meters from Kamstrup installed - a national first at this scale. For now, November 2024, 30,000 households have been equipped with the new meters.  

Via a fixed network solution, all digital meters transmit data from the households to the utility and provide full transparency of what is happening in the water distribution. This has a number of benefits, such as providing frequent and correct data to ensure accurate billing of water consumption per household and providing insights to enable instant action in case that anything out of the ordinary happens – both in households and in the network.

One of the standout features of the Kamstrup smart meters is its integrated acoustic leak detection. An advanced technology using ultrasound to detect noise patterns in the water networks and thereby letting the meters do the hard work of methodically locating potential leaks.  

The most common way of detecting leaks today in France is to manually search through a section or district from one end to another – purely reactive. Thus, identifying leaks in the water network with cost -and operational efficiency now through acoustic leak detection integrated in the meters is a game-changer. The goal is to minimize or even prevent water loss. Water loss – or non-revenue water – is a global problem that leads to large volumes of water being lost, in France accounting for as much as 23%.