Innovation: Smart Meters for Household Water Consumption Feedback

Providing feedback to consumers about their water consumption to detect potential leaks and save water. This is the goal of Hydro Smart Meter, a new smart meter patented by ENEA to integrate data on water - in addition to electricity and gas-  into the Smart Home.

In the last few years there has been growing interest in smart meters, typically referring to electricity and gas meters, less frequently to water ones.

The  Hydro Smart Meter can be easily integrated into the Smart Home, providing automated water management to detect leaks and prevent unecessary water use and sudden flooding, especially in the absence of the owner ", Sabrina Romano, ENEA researcher at the Smart Cities and Communities Laboratory explained.

Hydro Smart Meter has a "hardware" component to be installed in place or downstream of the pre-existing water meter and a cloud-based software where  the incoming data from the other smart meters are integrated.

In the first phase the software collects water, electricity and gas load profiles of  the monitored home.

"The system can identify both low-flow and massive leaks, the latter due to a sudden break, in order to send alarms and, if enabled, also to close the system by operating a solenoid valve to stop the water inflow to the house ”, Romano said.

The hardware system is also equipped with Energy Harvesting [1], ensuring full operability of the system, with the only inconvenience of having to replace the  buffer battery every four years.

For more information please contact:

Sabrina Romano, ENEA-Smart Cities and Communities Laboratory, sabrina.romano@enea.it

[1] Process by which energy from alternative sources is captured and stored, where the so-called alternative energy sources are all those commonly found in nature. This process converts them into electricity ready for use.