The role and importance of smart water meters in the water supply system

Abstract

The water meters installed in pipe connections of customers aim to meter the amount of water supplied, but rising requirements due to efficiency of water network operation and necessity of water loss reduction cause wider needs for additional information coming from metering of water consumption. On the other hand, producers offer modern types of smart water meters, which apart from metering only provide the analysis of water consumption with distinction of alarm incidents. There are also wider accessible technologies of metered data transferring and also based on Internet of things technologies (IoT). The implementation of modern metering technologies as well as data analysis inside of the counters and hourly data transfer gives new opportunity to use the data. In this paper authors described the differences between mechanical and electronic water meters as well as the advantages and 
disadvantages of modern solutions. Attention was drawn to the fact that the use of modern and intelligent electronic water meters brings not only benefits, but also new threats that we need to be aware of and the necessity of proper meter management. Nevertheless, having a stationary reading system is now becoming, or will become in the near future, a new standard, and instead of the term remote reading, it will be possible to talk about the transmission of data from water meters. The hourly flow data transmission system based on the LTE Cat M1 protocol, presented in this work, is currently being implemented in the Waterworks of the City of Krakow.