Water loss management per zone.

What is water loss management?

Water loss management is the practice of measuring, explaining and reducing the gap between the water a utility produces and the water it bills for. In a typical municipal network somewhere between 10% and 30% of treated water never reaches a bill – water that was pumped, treated and paid for before it disappeared.

The gap is not one thing. Part of it left through a hole in a pipe. Part of it reached a tap and was mismeasured on the way, by a tired meter or a data feed that stopped. And part of it the utility handed out on purpose – hydrant flushing, firefighting, mains maintenance – which is fine, as long as somebody wrote it down. A crew with listening sticks fixes the first, a meter-replacement programme fixes the second, and plain bookkeeping fixes the third, so telling them apart is the first real task.

How it works on Divako

1. Meters. System input meters, zone boundary meters and customer meters are registered in one hierarchy, so the platform knows which meters belong to which zone and which direction the water flows.
2. Network. Whatever carries the reading – LoRaWAN, wM-Bus, NB-IoT, or a collector carried past the meter on foot or in a van – it arrives in one shape. Without that, a subtraction across a district is not arithmetic, it is guesswork.
3. Platform. Readings are validated and time-aligned before anything is subtracted. Gaps, duplicates and meters that have stopped changing are flagged, because a missing customer meter looks exactly like loss.
4. Analysis. The balance is recomputed as the readings land, not once a quarter: how much went in, how much was billed, what the gap is as a percentage, and where the night-time baseline is heading for each district and each meter. Cross a threshold you set and it goes out by email, webhook or into whatever incident system is already on the wall.
5. Integration. The figures export for leakage reporting and for the annual accounts, and the series behind them is available over REST and MQTT.

What to watch out for

• A boundary valve that is not quite shut invents loss. A zone is only measurable if its boundary is real. One partly open valve, one cross-connection nobody documented, and the balance shows a leak that is actually a neighbour’s consumption. Confirm the boundary in the field before believing the first months of figures.
• Minimum night flow is not zero for good reasons. Night-shift industry, a large building’s circulation, legitimate filling – all of it flows at three in the morning. What matters is the change in the baseline, not the absolute value, and each zone deserves its own baseline rather than a shared target.
• Apparent losses hide inside the meter fleet. An old meter that under-registers at low flow quietly moves water from “billed” into “lost”. Before launching a leak-hunting programme, check meter age and drift – otherwise you will send crews out to find a leak that is sitting in the accounting.
• A balance is only as good as the worst clock in the zone. Meters whose clocks have drifted by minutes produce loss figures that are timing error. Check clock offset as routine data quality, and treat a sudden change in a zone’s loss figure as a data question before it becomes a field question.