You may find yourself at a loss when trying to make your operations more efficient and improve your green credentials. However, you’ll be delighted to know that smart water management using IoT could drastically improve your situation. Smart water management using IoT can help enhance water quality, among other benefits.
For example, smart sensors give you unprecedented insight into your equipment, ensuring critical infrastructure like pipelines or pumps maintains high functionality, IoT development services also help you maintain Regulatory Compliance while undertaking challenging operations like Wastewater disposal.
4 Examples of Smart Water Management Using IoT
Now let’s examine some real-world examples of the advantages you can derive from smart water management systems.
1. Water Quality Management
It is critical to monitor household water quality, particularly for drinking purposes. Both surface and groundwater sources may have been contaminated by dangerous chemicals or bacteria.
In addition, continuously increasing population density and Global urbanization are steadily worsening the overall quality available to most human beings. IoT can give you a level of oversight and analysis to confirm that any water distributed by your systems complies with regulatory standards and is safe for human use.
You can handily deal with any quality problems with a water quality management system using IoT. In the bad old days without IoT, manual collection and painstaking water sample analysis were the order of the day. Such a process requires significant infrastructure, large equipment, and a substantial workforce, guaranteeing the process is expensive and slow.
On the other hand, IoT sensors can measure temperature, water turbidity, and contaminant levels. This measurement can occur with zero human intervention at an incredibly rapid pace.
In addition, deploying such infrastructure makes it possible for operators to receive data from multiple samples in multiple locations continuously. This diversity of data enables quality control operations remotely at a vastly increased frequency.
The city of Atlanta, Georgia, uses one solution from Ericsson and AT&T to continuously monitor its water quality and boost its sustainability. In Atlanta, over 4 million citizens get their drinking water out of the Chattahoochee River. This practice could be unsafe or unpredictable without the intervention of IoT.
Distributed sensors allow the city to check water conductivity, temperature, thermometry, turbidity, and any other quality parameters necessary to ensure Atlanta residents’ health and safety.
2. Water Level Monitoring
The reality of the modern industrial infrastructure is that the water to supply livestock and irrigation and many Industries comes from reservoirs created by dams. While they have flaws, These large dams and reservoirs are critical in modern flood control techniques and can help with River navigation. The crucial step is ensuring that water levels in reservoirs at any dams are safe and that all safety equipment functions correctly. Once again, the issue is that traditional monitoring techniques are complex, time-consuming, and less reliable than their IoT-enabled counterparts.
However, you can improve all of these issues through monitoring water levels and wider management of dams using IoT. Distributed sensors (pressure, ultrasonic, and vibration) can help operators keep an eye on the external and internal state of their Dam.
For example, pressure sensors can help detect pipe leaks or changes to structural stability, and IoT systems can provide immediate alerts based on any change. More, these sensors can continuously update you on the capacity and availability of water within each separate Reservoir. When it comes to irrigation, this can be especially critical.
Smart Solutions designed by a dedicated IoT app development company can also equip you to manage gate movement remotely. As a result, your people are safer because they don’t need to go to the water management site when severe weather conditions like storms, floods, or hurricanes require the operation of gates. If or when the water reaches a predetermined level, the system can decide, based on all appropriate information, whether it should open or close the gate.
A ThingsLog monitoring solution helps dam owners in Bulgaria manage over 100 dams. Each dam site uses IoT sensors to monitor water levels remotely. Any time there is a chance of flooding, these systems can instantly send alerts to the appropriate staff. Again, these smart capabilities render it unnecessary to send staff to measure these water levels.
3. Smart Water Management for Agriculture
A growing world population requires growing quantities of food. In recent decades this pattern has only accelerated, with changes in food consumption further driving this growth. For example, increased meat consumption requires increased crop consumption for animal feed, which has increased crop growth worldwide, necessitating wise water consumption.
This is because either insufficient or excess water can have a tremendously negative impact on crop yields. Fortunately, IoT makes the process of water management in agriculture and irrigation smart and efficient in a way that was previously unimaginable.
IoT-enabled smart water management systems for agriculture can virtually guarantee improved crop yields while reducing staffing costs. In addition, these systems help farmers avoid unintentional or even unnoticed water waste. Sensors can monitor various parameters such as soil moisture, temperature, and humidity to decide how much water your crop will need, given these contextual factors.
For example, you would connect these sensors to the sprinklers and the field in systems that use sprinkler irrigation. This multi-point connectivity provides the necessary information about how much water you need and how much you have already applied. Farmers can also receive frequent updates via their smartphones or other connected devices.
Crop water management using IoT can also let farms use far less water while producing the same crops. They can also reduce their fertilizer use, save energy by pumping far less water, and reduce the time and money expenditures embodied in Staffing. In addition, an IoT solution can enable you to monitor water levels in your tanks no matter how many or how widely distributed. And once you add AI into the mix, it becomes possible to plan agricultural activities in a way past generations could not imagine.
The Galileo system from Galcon is ideally suited to helping with irrigation on wide-open farmland or greenhouses. The open field version of this system both around 200 irrigation programs. A farmer can monitor as many as 50 main irrigation lines using this system. You can also vary the intensity of water flow and schedule any water movement activities.
4. Smart City Water Management
Every city must monitor its water supply, consider the ongoing water consumption, and verify its equipment’s continued function. IoT brings better control and a new degree of transparency to the entire water supply chain.
Using a smart city water management system, you can collect real-time data using sensors. Using this information, you can understand water distribution across your entire network. At the same time, individual residents can make better-informed decisions using smart meters, making cities more sustainable.
IoT also provides a new level of insight into the ongoing health of water processing and management equipment. Sensors can instantly detect new leaks in pipes and give operators the necessary alerts to fix the problem immediately before it becomes serious. AI predictions can help you see these issues in advance, avoiding possible disruption in your water supply chain. Well-placed sensors can help avoid failures before they turn into catastrophic incidents.
In contrast, AI prediction may help you better anticipate when preventive maintenance or repair will be necessary, even before equipment degradation. Less water waste is self-evidently good for the environment and positive for any city’s budget.
In Colombia, the city of Cartagena uses smart Irrigation in Municipal Gardens and parks. This solution monitors the state of the soil, the current weather forecast, and the historical irrigation calendar to determine how much water each area will need. This system also provides alarms and alerts to the necessary operators if anything goes wrong. For example, the system immediately detects any leaks and quickly highlights their location to enable Municipal operators to affect quick and cost-effective repairs.
Bottom Line
IoT brings a previously unimaginable level of transparency and radically improved control to your entire water supply chain. IoT can help cities and Industrial producers maintain water health and quality, improve water use efficiency, and remain compliant with regulations.
In addition, IoT capabilities can equip you to collect and recycle Wastewater efficiently and safely. So it’s clear that Smart IoT Water Management is a positive thing. You just need a trusted consultant to help you optimize your water production, distribution, and consumption. Softeq is that trusted consultant. So book a consultation with us today to see how we can help you reap the benefits of smart water management using IoT.
