Water metering and revenue protection

Abstract

It is common for water supply authorities to have considerable, “Unaccounted-For” water (UFW) through water loss (`leakage’) from the water distribution system. Water loss reduces the amount of available water for end users and impacts upon the Water Supplier financially, as it strives to supply water at a fair and reasonable price, while seeking to recover the cost of supplying water to its customers. It is difficult to clearly identify leakages, due to the delay between water usage, customer billing and receipt of payment, in a water distribution system with a large customer base. It is difficult to accurately report water usage over short periods, thus it is difficult to clearly identify where and when leakage occurs. This project identifies strategies to improve the water-accounting system through timely data-collection and processing. The purpose of this project is to review the current water-metering and data-collection system used, in order to benchmark this process against current best-practice methods employed by Water Supply Authorities (WSA). The result of this investigation is a review of available metering and data-collection systems, in line with operational demands and current technological capabilities, including: • Identification of unaccounted (non-revenue) water loss. • Review of billed customer water-usage (revenue water). • Metering and data-collection system options, using Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) systems. AMR systems provide the ability to improve system monitoring and increased efficiencies related to water supply system management.