Technology · 2 March 2026
In most municipal water networks, somewhere between 10% and 30% of the water that leaves the treatment plant never gets billed. Zone-level metering is the single most useful tool to find out where it went – and to stop the next leak before it becomes the next emergency.
A zone meter sits at the boundary between two parts of a water network. The rest of the network’s instrumentation is downstream – household meters, large customer meters, fire hydrant meters where they exist. The zone meter knows how much water entered the zone. Sum the downstream meters and you know how much was accounted for. The difference is loss.
That sounds simple. The trick is that without continuous, harmonised data, the difference number is unusable noise – meters out of sync, missed reads, different units, different intervals. With one platform doing the parsing, validation and time alignment, the number becomes a signal.
At 3 am, almost nobody is using water. Whatever is flowing through a zone meter at minimum night flow is – to a first approximation – leakage and unmetered use. A reliable baseline needs about a month of nights; once it is in place, a step change in the night flow points at a new leak the next morning.
Most leaks announce themselves this way long before they are visible at the surface or on a customer’s bill. The job of the platform is to make the step change obvious and route it to the operator who can do something about it.
Minimum night flow analysis, step by step shows how to turn the night flow into a leakage estimate.
Three things, in the same view:
Routed to whoever is on call. Nothing more clever than that – the value is in the timeliness, not the maths.
Operators we work with talk about the difference in months saved per find. A leak caught from minimum night flow takes hours to localise. The same leak caught from a customer complaint takes weeks – and by then the bill, the road repair and the regulator’s attention have all arrived together.
Talk to us about a water-loss programme See water networks →
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Your network
Tell us your zone count and meter fleet – we'll come back with a sketch of what continuous water balance would look like for you.