Water companies are finally embracing new technologies which could help avert the UK鈥檚 water wastage crisis.
The government issued a dire warning on Wednesday that rivers and wildlife could be left without sufficient water unless action is taken to reduce its use and wastage. Currently an estimated three billion litres are lost per day.
Environment Agency chair Emma Howard Boyd called on industry to innovate and 鈥減ursue ambitious water resource management plans鈥� to address the leakage problems.
Such plans are already being made around Internet of Things intelligent sensor technology.
Ian Banham, Microsoft鈥檚 technical sales lead for the IoT in the UK, told 老九品茶Cloud that it and partner firm Tech Data are in talks with many of the water companies about deploying projects.
鈥淚鈥檓 dealing with water companies at the moment who’ve been collecting data via dial-up modems for the last 25 years,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hey鈥檝e really jumped on to the IoT in the last six to eight months.
鈥淭hey鈥檙e looking to connect up the pumping stations and analyse the flow of water within the pipes to try and detect leaks and make their processes more efficient.
鈥淭hey鈥檙e looking to save large sums of money by being able to react better to large rainfall and manage where the water is.鈥�
The projects involve smart sensors on manhole covers and in storm drains which feed data back about water levels at far more frequent intervals than has been possible in the past.
鈥淚n the last 25 years they’ve collected data but haven鈥檛 had the means to store it or analyse it to find out what’s going wrong and do something about it,鈥� he explained.
鈥淭hey only got the data when it was too late because it only sent it back every hour so, which is too slow during a particularly heavy rainfall. With this technology they can react more quickly.
鈥淎 lot of the water companies have storage facilities for water so, if they have that data, they can move water about to avoid floods and sewage overflows.
鈥淭hat is massively important because they’re only allowed so many sewage flood incidents per year and, as soon as they go over that, the fines can run into millions of pounds.
鈥淚f sewage gets into people鈥檚 houses, they have to move the family out for five to eight months to replaster and refit the inside of the house and get everything clean. The costs are enormous and the PR side of it is disastrous.
鈥淭he cost of the project is significant but the potential savings from it, over the lifetime of those sensors of ten-plus years, are fairly monstrous.鈥�
Speaking at Tech Data’s IoT on Wheels roadshow at Salford Quays, Banham says that many of the responses to the data can be automated through analytics programmes which take in data in 鈥榥ear real-time鈥�.
鈥淚t can pick up on events of interest and communicate them forward to other systems or people to get them to do something,鈥� he said. 鈥淚n many cases, there’s no need for humans to even be involved.鈥�
He added: 鈥淚ndustry in the UK is finally waking up: there’s been a lot of conservatism with regards to the IoT 鈥� sit back, wait and see what other people do and then think about doing it.
鈥淲e’re reaching that point now where there’s a lot more interest from companies in the industrial sector to talk to us and look at projects we can help them with.鈥�