Why Water Utilities Should Build Their Own Water Leakage Solution (And Why It’s Easier Than You Think)

By Srinath Sridhar, Altis Consulting

Imagine you have a magic tool at your disposal that could easily detect pesky water leaks early and simultaneously monitor your district metered areas (DMAs). Solving these two challenges would have monumental impacts upon your business as a water utility. Efficient water distribution? Yes please. Reduced non-revenue water losses? Even better. Minimised water waste, lower repair costs, and service reliability? Truly magical.   

In reality, most water utilities quickly discover that existing commercial off-the-shelf tools (COTS) fall short. In our experience, no single option currently offers a comprehensive, end-to-end solution, with most struggling to assist the entire value chain. 

From our experience partnering with water utilities, Altis recommends building your own water leakage solution. Best of all? It’s much easier than you think – you can use your existing enterprise data stack, with technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks, or Microsoft. 

6 Reasons Why a Custom Solution Outperforms a COTS Solution:

1. Uses Existing Technology: You probably already have a modern data and analytics platform in place. These platforms, which may already ingest SCADA, smart meters, IoT and other data sources, can unlock significant value when used to their full potential.
2. Higher Customisation and Flexibility: A custom-built solution offers you significantly higher customisation and flexibility compared to a COTS solution. For example, a delta lake medallion architecture can seamlessly configure your business rules across IT and OT data sources. Visualisation tools like Power BI offer high flexibility and customisation for creating reports and dashboards, including GIS integration to overlay maps and boundaries. The data platform can also trigger events and alarms based on your business rules and threshold conditions.
3. Better Integration with Existing Systems: Building the solution on your data platform offers better integration opportunities. Existing integrations between SCADA /IoT/Smart meters and the data platform avoid data ingress/egress from core analytics systems to the COTS solution. Existing data platforms also offer consumption mechanisms via dashboards and APIs, which can be used to integrate with downstream applications and systems.
4. Scalability and Future-Proofing: As a water utility, you have significant opportunities as you transition to a fully digital organisation of the future. You can implement use cases in water leakage, asset management, operations, customer service, and other areas where future solutions will be built. A scalable approach across use cases is preferable to COTS. You cannot use a COTS solution for water leakage in other areas such as asset management and operations. Building the solution on your data platform means the foundational data work is already done, and you can reuse the same templates across various use cases.
5. Cost Management and Savings Over the Medium/Long Term: A custom-built solution doesn’t come with licensing costs, making it significantly cheaper in the medium to long term. Cloud data platforms offer pay-as-you-go pricing based on storage and compute. You will also save on ingress/egress costs between the COTS tool and the existing data ecosystem if you opt for a custom-built solution. This, of course, assumes that the solution is built in an optimised way on the data platform.
6. Better Data Ownership and Security: Keeping data within existing systems doesn’t introduce new data ownership and security issues. As the current ecosystem has already been evaluated for ownership and safety, this pathway is safer.

Next, we’ll look at how you can use data in tandem from other technologies to develop the full picture.

Magic of Three: How SCADA, IoT and Smart Meters reduce water leakage

If you want to effectively reduce water leaks and save money, then look no further than SCADA, smart meters, and IoT sensors. Together, they provide an end-to-end approach to detecting and reducing water leaks across your entire supply network. Here’s how each technology helps and where they fall short if used in isolation:

• SCADA systems offer centralised control and monitor core infrastructure such as treatment plants, reservoirs, and trunk mains. This helps to identify major flow anomalies, but these systems lack visibility in smaller distribution pipes. 
• Smart meters extend coverage to individual properties, capturing near real-time usage data that can reveal continuous low-level flow, often linked to customer-side leaks. However, these systems may miss leaks in the distribution network itself, such as those in street mains or service lines.
• IoT sensors, including acoustic, pressure and flow devices, fill this gap by delivering high-frequency, localised data from points traditionally unmonitored. 

Combined, these technologies create a layered network that enables faster leak detection, reduces non-revenue water, and supports more proactive asset management across urban water systems.

Now, we’ll explore what a custom solution might look like in practice.

Crucial Building Blocks: A Custom Solution’s Functional Architecture

To ensure you build a magic tool and not a lemon, we recommend your custom water leakage solution has these five functional components:

1. Integration Layer: This layer consumes data from devices (IoT, SCADA, digital meters) as well as IT sources like GIS, CRM, and other applications. It caters to both real-time and batch integration.
2. Alarms and Events Interface: This interface is used by various user personas to manage events and alarms. It can be built on Node.js, Streamlit, or other options as required.
3. Data Analytics Platform: This is the rules processing engine where you can build and manage a variety of simple, medium, and complex alarms. You also base your business rules on descriptive patterns as well as machine learning patterns.
4. Visualisation and Reporting Layer: This layer reports on various patterns in the data from IT/OT sources. User personas evaluate the dashboards and reports to create new rules and alarms as required.
5. Governance and Security: These components ensure data privacy and security considerations for the solution.

Detecting water leaks early and effectively monitoring DMAs can positively impact your organisation across every level: financially, operationally, and strategically. If you struggle to find a suitable solution that waves a magic wand over your operations, feel assured that you have the (better) option of building your own solution, on your own data stack, with your own technologies.

Curious what a custom leakage solution could look like for your utility? Let’s explore it together. Reach out to our team today.