Water metering: How smart is too smart?

Only around half the properties in the UK are water metered but a further rollout is central to business plans for AMP7.

The National Infrastructure Commission’s 2018 report advocated greater meter penetration to help reduce consumption, advising smart metering as the way to go. But, with millions of properties yet to move onto a meter and evidence of a public backlash in energy, which approach has the best chance of success? Utility Week talked to Arqiva about how smart networks can find leaks and South Staffs Water on customer preference for more traditional methods.

Smart thinking

Metering can be advanced infrastructure-based (AMI) using a radio network, or automatic meter reading (AMR) using short-range radios built into meters.

John Lillistone, director of water at Arqiva – a company operating AMI networks – explained its system is deployed on a private spectrum, which guarantees the level of service the water companies receive. The radio network operates on a low frequency, which Lillistone said gives better coverage than higher frequency mobile networks.

Arqiva owns the low-frequency spectrum meters are connected to and, until recently, owned and operated most the 7,000 towers around the country. It sold the bulk of these to telecoms operator Cellnex in October but kept 1,200 key sites and maintains access to all.

The upshot of this is reach of coverage. Systems reliant on mobile network coverage could be constricted in busy areas when the network is overworked, or in parts of a region where signal is weak.

Arqiva has run long-term trials with Southern, South East, Severn Trent and Anglian, which signed up to deploy around two million smart meters over this and the next AMP cycle. Thames attributed part of its progress hitting leakage targets to the data from its smart meters that showed where water was being lost.

Each meter sends a read of how much water has passed through it every hour and can be switched to a variety of feeds including readings every 15 minutes. When Thames began using the meters it gained more data in a single day than it had had in the previous four years.

The question is, what do you do with all that data?

“It’s actually very simple to work out leaks,” Lillistone said. “If you have continuous flow throughout the day then you have a leak and can quantify it. This can be turned into pounds, shillings and pence.” He said one company wrote to customers where household leaks were detected telling them the cost of the water lost to the leak. Three quarters of those were then repaired within three days at no cost to the company.

“We’re very focussed on domestic leakage, our trials show 90 per cent of these can be fixed quickly and we’re moving on to doing this in distribution networks as well.”

One company is set to begin a trial with Arqiva to install smart meters at every property within a single district meter area (DMA). The DMA meter feed identifies how much water is being used through all properties and how much is being leaked.

“With the DMA data we will see how much water has gone in, deduct how much goes to the consumers, whatever is different is being lost in the network,” Lillistone said. “Then we can help them find where using a selection of acoustic loggers, pressure sensors and pressure valves.”

For optimal performance these require slightly different network settings that Arqiva is now using to boost its network – providing it can guarantee the capacity, security and coverage.

Empowering customers

The data gathered can be used to communicate with the end user about not only leaks but consumption too.

“There is a need to make people aware of water and that they are a steward of a very valuable resource. We can give data to end users to see leakage and start to look at occupancy and property type.”

He said as more meters are deployed, understanding will grow about how households use water and can be compared to similar properties.

“A problem people have is linking water to the cost of abstraction and the impact on environment,” Lillistone said, “We can use the data to make these links to show people if they are using more or less than average and how to reduce consumption.”

He said consumption dropped by 18 per cent in areas using smart meters, but there is more to do to help consumers connect their usage to the wider environment and the cost of wasting water.

Mandating meters

Despite the benefits, Lillistone does not think a compulsory approach to metering is appropriate.

“Generally water companies are seeing the benefits of metering and are rolling out more meters – not necessarily smart ones – and that’s a really good thing but it’s difficult to say if it will become compulsory. There are signs that Ofwat could change their position on whether only water-stressed areas need a metering programme and they are under pressure from the NIC that says there should be compulsory programme and it should be smart metering.”

He believes water companies and consumers will get on board without any need for regulatory involvement: “It should be a pull rather than a push.

“The industry as a whole would like to avoid what’s happened with electricity and gas that has created an ecosystem that people struggle to navigate – we all want to avoid that.”

He said Ofwat’s push on leakage, data transparency and customer engagement in PR19 is leading the sector towards metering.

“The price determinations made a lot of people reassess their plans to look for a bigger bang for their buck and not doing things as they did before. We saw a significant increase in enquires in the run up to the final determinations in December.”

But with so much information available, is there a risk of an overload of data?

“As a water company you do need to think about that. Going from traditionally two meter reads a year to 24 a day – it really changes current ways of handling meter data because they won’t handle the influx.”

Public scepticism 

This excess of information means some companies are staying away from smart metering and with only 50 per cent of the UK on a water meter it could be a step too far. Many areas still have rateable water and in non-water stressed parts there is no compulsion to have even that.

South Staffs and Cambridge Water has plans to ramp up its metering programme in AMP7 but opted for a non-smart approach, which metering manager Heidi Knapton explained has been important to billpayers.

She said reluctance around installing a meter is often allayed because the company has opted not to install smart technology. “There isn’t a real market for it at the moment,” Knapton said. “Customers simply don’t want this much information.”

The company is exploring using bin lorries as meter readers as part of automatic meter reading (AMR) system. There are short range radios built into the meters that get “read” by receiving equipment on bin lorries – which drive slowly past all homes every two weeks and transmit the data to water companies.

South Staffs began a trial last year with Lichfield Council to read meters using wireless technology once a fortnight to identify leaks and improve consumption data. This jump from meter reads once or twice a year to fortnightly, offers sufficient insight for customers to understand their usage, Knapton said.

Meter installations were paused because of lockdown but work has now resumed to install 9,000 a year.

The company wrote to 20,000 households inviting them to have a meter installed and because of lockdown it had to cancel around 2,000 appointments, which Knapton said should be back on track by September.

Open data

At present most data is used internally but Arqiva is exploring plans to share it with the end users – which Lillistone believes is key to changing consumption patterns.

“The day people are aware of how much water they are using, how much it costs them and how it compares to best practice is the time we will start to see significant reductions in usage,” he said. “We need to educate people. The public desire to move to net-carbon neutral and a more environmentally responsible way of living is broad and deep in the population. We have a duty to use the data in the right way for the right purposes.”