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Water consumption is outstripping supply. The National Geographic Society says we are consuming eight times more water than we did a century ago[1], a concern that is leading to the ‘water gap’, where renewable water sources can’t keep pace with demand. It’s a problem made worse in times of drought, and affects high-income countries as much as it does low-income ones. Its effects can have severe health, agricultural, industrial, environmental, and social impacts.
The water gap can be explained by various causes that don’t always have easy solutions, including climate change, population growth, rapid urban development, even contamination. But two major contributing factors that can be addressed are failing infrastructure and poor management of water resources.
Identifying and reporting water leaks
In Europe, ageing infrastructure is seeing huge amounts of water lost. While the Netherlands only loses around five percent of its water supply to leaks, Bulgaria (60 percent), Ireland (53 percent) and Romania (41 percent), all have major problems. Across the continent as a whole, every year around 25 percent of water is lost to pipe leaks[2].
The European Union (EU) is taking action, requiring water utilities to monitor and report leakage rates, and develop action plans when those rates exceed mandated levels. The staged directive won’t be fully implemented until 2028, but forward-thinking water utilities are acting now, and employing technology to help in the fight to stem water losses.
To minimize water lost to leaks, utilities need a reliable and fast way to identify when and where a leak is occurring. Traditionally this would be done by deploying maintenance crews to the location of a suspected leak for further testing. More recently, even sniffer dogs trained to smell treated drinking water have even been used to locate burst pipes, but while these methods can be effective, they take precious time and are expensive at scale, which is why they are now being replaced by much more efficient IoT sensors and cellular IoT wireless connectivity.
- Read more: Cellular IoT dominates LPWANs
Cellular IoT-based condition monitoring
IoT sensors can be deployed across a water network to continuously monitor the condition and activity of water pipes using acoustics. Monitoring noise levels in water pipes is effective because when a pipe starts leaking a clear high pitch sound can be heard. These sensors must be continuously ‘listening’ because as leaks grow, the noise levels tend to decrease and it can be harder to distinguish a leak from other background noise. This data is periodically relayed to the Cloud using cellular IoT wireless connectivity, where advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms can be used to determine if any anomalies that occur over time are indicative of a potential leak. If a leak is suspected, then and only then is human intervention required and a maintenance crew can be dispatched to investigate and minimize any potential water losses.
Horten Municipality in southern Norway is already trialing a version of this technology to detect leaks in drinking water networks in the region. In collaboration with smart condition monitoring solution provider, 7Sense, and supported by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, the municipality has rolled out a fleet of IoT sensors powered by Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF91 Series low power module with integrated LTE-M/NB-IoT modem and GNSS, in an effort to meet its individual sustainability goal of 18 percent water loss by 2028.
For the last three years it has reported a stable leakage level of 16-17 percent, and this project will help maintain that level or decrease it further by locating small hard-to-find leakages, often found on private pipe connections.
- Read more: Managing IoT Devices from the Cloud
A cellular IoT module for a challenging problem
Nordic’s range of cellular IoT modules are ideally suited to this and other smart city remote condition monitoring tasks because of their unique combination of powerful processing, ample memory resources, radio sensitivity, and low power consumption.
The nRF91 Series cellular IoT modules integrate a powerful Arm Cortex-M33 programmable application processor with generous 1 MB non-volatile memory (NVM) and 256 KB RAM, to collect and process the data from the acoustic sensor. The modules also offer ample processing overhead for the inclusion of additional sensors as required. For example, Horten Municipality’s final version of the pipe monitoring solution will include a three-axis accelerometer to monitor the position of the sensor on the pipe to ensure the sensor isn’t unintentionally moved. For example if service personnel accidentally contact it when performing other work.
Meanwhile the nRF91 Series modules' +23 dBM max transmit power ensures long-range communication over LTE-M and NB-IoT, even in areas with unfriendly signal conditions, essential for any application where the system will be installed several meters below ground such as water pipe monitoring applications. For the same reason, low power consumption ensures maintenance crews aren’t forever having to replace batteries in hard to reach locations, increasingly important as networks of sensors expand into the thousands or tens of thousands.
In Horten Municipality, the sensors are providing a battery life of more than five years, thanks in part to the nRF91 Series’ low power consumption attributes, such as support for PSM and eDRX power saving modes.
As the EU and other nations continue to legislate acceptable thresholds on lost drinking water, so we will see the increasing implementation of IoT sensors and cellular IoT to help utilities and authorities meet these targets. Zero lost water may still be a pipe dream for now, but closing the water gap remains critical for the global population and the environment.
References
1. Plugging the leak: Innovative solutions for reducing water loss and it's economic impact. Global Water Intelligence, March 2025
2. EU urges to monitor and reduce water leakages. Water News Europe, December 2022
