Smart water metering as a technology is something that dates back a couple of decades, recognised as a technology that has the potential to significantly improve issues the water industry faces, by providing continuous, smart data. Some of these issues – like leaks, water shortages and the pressure to ensure a consistent water supply to a growing population of people – have become more pervasive in recent years.
To learn more about how one water supplier is taking on smart metering, IoT Insider spoke to Doug Spencer, Smart Metering Manager at Anglian Water, who are in the midst of rolling out 1.1 million smart water meters.
Smart water metering: then and now
According to Spencer, smart water metering is “one of the stumbling blocks that the industry has [faced] for quite some time. We seem to have finally coalesced on it, in the fact that people talk about smart metering.”
Smart metering has undergone its own evolution – what was once regarded as “smart”, is no more. The smart metering of today is represented by Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) metering. This technology involves masts and meters that communicate on a regular basis, and represents an evolution from Automatic Meter Reading (AMR).
“If you roll the clock back 14 years ago, AMR is the walk by, drive by side of metering that was viewed as smart metering because [these] meters had an element of onboard memory that could keep leak alarms, tamper alarms and high consumption … The definition of smart metering has moved on,” he explained.
Anglian Water’s smart metering rollout
The rollout of Anglian Water’s 1.1 million smart water meters – which, for clarity purposes, is still ongoing, as they have now achieved the 1 million mark – was as much a passion project for Spencer as it was a huge hurdle to overcome.
Trials of AMI metering began in 2017 and 2018, where 17,500 customers experienced AMI metering. A company-wide rollout began in 2020.
“It’s fair to say that … the view is Anglian has been fairly successful in getting this rollout done, doubly so when you bear in mind that we had to mobilise at the start of lockdown,” Spencer explained.
“The East of England is under huge pressure in terms of supply, demand balance, a low rainfall and increasing population,” he summarised. “We have to make smart metering work.”
The technology behind it
The smart water metering technology which Anglian Water has deployed is supplied by Arqiva and is the Sensus’ two-way FlexNet. Sensus is a Xylem brand. Anglian Water worked with both Arqiva and Sensus for the trials they conducted, having also previously trialled NB-IoT with Telefónica.
“FlexNet is our full rollout technology. It operates on a private license frequency in the UK, on 433MHz,” explained Spencer. “It’s a two-step box piece of technology: there is the meter and a secondary box called an end point. The end point is effectively the long-range network transmitter, and the meter itself is an AMR that transmits on 433.”
“The most common installation for these [meters] is in the boundary box at the end of the driveway,” he continued, “the end point will be installed within a foot or two of the meter. The end point then transmits on 412MHz, up to the antenna, and we’ve got coming up to 300 antennas to cover half of our region.”
Interestingly, Anglian Water built their own proprietary technology for analysing the data the smart water meters feed them. “It was a huge undertaking,” Spencer said of the smart meter data infrastructure, which was built to give them more control and a bespoke feel. “We were using a commercial meter data management system but in the run up to the rollout it was decided we wanted to deliver this ourselves.”
One advantage of this infrastructure has been its ability to automate what were more arduous tasks, which can be observed in a weather leakage tool the company offers its customers.
“We were having to manually process all of those leaks, looking at the letters that we’d sent, the responses that we’d had … we continued building the customer leakage tool which effectively automated the whole CRM.” With 100,000 meters leaks could be manually processed, but with 1 million meters, Spencer concluded, this would have been “just impossible”.
Key takeaways
“Oddly enough, I had the same question yesterday at Future Water Association,” Spencer said at the time of our conversation when posed a question about key takeaways. “What has given us a North Star is that this is being done for our customers.”
In “engaging customers and getting them on board” to change water habits, like not keeping the tap on when they brush their teeth and having shorter showers, Spencer acknowledged this couldn’t be done without having the quality data to back them up.
“We’ve seen that from the energy market, where performance has been poor from time to time. I’ve got energy meters, every once in a while they fail … and it does impact how much I engage with them.”
Regardless of the technology that is used, the customer relationship is the most important, he concluded.
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