Development and Implementation of a Smart Water Metering and Monitoring System for Homes with Intermittent Water Supply

Abstract

The need for efficient water management is critical today, as this resource faces increasing scarcity due to population growth, pollution, climate change, depletion, and overexploitation of water resources. This further exacerbates the problem of intermittent water supply (IWS), where consumers receive running water for less than 24 h a day, 7 days a week, affecting more than one billion people worldwide. This article presents the development and implementation of a smart water metering and monitoring system (SWMMS) for households affected by IWS. The system comprises IoT devices that record water levels and consumption and supply events in real time; cloud computing services to store and process the readings taken by the IoT devices; and a mobile application that allows users to view the available volume, consult their daily consumption history, and receive alerts for prolonged consumption time, overflows, and low water levels. The system was implemented for 115 days in a home suffering from an IWS, where a lower number of consumption events were recorded during the first 40 days of monitoring due to an initial behavioral response to continuous observation (Hawthorne effect), rather than an improvement in efficiency induced by the system.