This new decade has been increasingly dealing with challenges related to climate change and its aftermath.
The future years can undoubtedly witness an unpredictable water supply system, worsening water scarcity worldwide, dry river beds, severe drought, low rainfall, water contamination, and pollution. Whether you’re coming from a traditional agricultural firm or a modern hi-tech city administration, all these factors undeniably affect you. And if furthermore, you’re looking towards enhancing efficiency and boosting up your green credentials, you might not know where to look next.
This is where smart water management using IoT can significantly change the future for a better tomorrow.
Among the many growing benefits of IoT technology, it can help keep water quality sustainably high. Smart sensors can automate existing water management systems of warehouse heavy equipment like pumps and pipelines that are highly functional for water channeling, coupled with smart IoT services, they can even safely dispose of wastewater in line with municipal norms and regulations.
Now let’s take a closer look at the more common real-world examples and use cases that can successfully illustrate the practical advantages of deploying smart water management systems.
For the records, use cases of IoT water management.
City administrators and regulators need to keep a definite close eye on incoming water supply, consumption, and the equipment involved. With IoT in place, the whole water supply chain can be more transparent, and a lot easier to monitor and control.
Just with the help of sensors, a smart city water management system can be enabled to collect real-time data. And, source valuable information that can help visualize water distribution across the city networks. Residents with smart meters installed can make informed decisions leading to more sustainable water consumption overall.
Water waste and disrupted irregular water supply chains are a drain on the city’s budget. IoT can help watch the health and predictive maintenance of water equipment and detect problems quite early on, like leaky pipes. This allows operators to receive immediate alerts and start fixing issues at a very early stage. In the meantime, AI predictions will also allow nipping problems in the bud by preventing failures before they can potentially cause severe damage or losses. With AI-powered infrastructure, city administrators can also watch over the watersheds and tap on flood-prone regions, this can generate lifesaving information that can help local authorities warn residents, well manage traffic, and keep the city functioning in times of extreme weather events.
Smart Irrigation of City Parks
Smart irrigation in municipal parks and gardens is a futuristic solution that calculates the exact amount of water each area needs depending on soil state, upcoming weather forecasts, and the local irrigation calendar. If something goes wrong, such as an unseen leak, the local authorities are alerted right away and even notified of the exact location of concern.
Key benefits
- Transparency in water management
- Fewer damages
- Smart controls over the water supply
- Saving city budgets
- Improved city sustainability efforts
- Better Water Quality Management Systems
Watching over water quality in residences is crucial. Rivers, lakes, and reservoirs may contain several contaminants that are dangerous and hazardous, and the increasing world population combined with unplanned urbanization has worsened water quality over time. In our rapidly changing world, IoT can help safely monitor and analyze distributed water supplies and ensure it complies in line with regulatory standards.
A smart water quality management system using IoT deals with the present water quality issues effectively. A sample comparison can demonstrate this difference:
Without IoT in place, water samples needed to be collected and analyzed manually. This is cost inflating and time-consuming, requiring larger equipment and an expensive workforce. In stark contrast, IoT smart sensors can measure a variety of parameters in real-time like temperature and turbidity. With data collected from multiple samples, enables us to remotely perform quality control on distant water reserves.
Key benefits
- Better water quality
- Saving budgets on cutting down manual analysis of water samples
- Smaller workforce
- Remote quality control
- Compliance with regulatory norms
- Safe Water Level Monitoring and Dam Management
Dams supply livestock and irrigation and industries. Playing a pivotal role in flood control and assisting river navigation, it’s crucial that existing dams and reservoirs function safely and their water levels are regulated. The trouble is that traditional monitoring methods often are too time-consuming, cost inflating and complex.
Water level monitoring and management
Dams using IoT ultrasonic, vibration, and pressure sensors can help monitor daily functions. With pressure sensors, in place helps in detecting leaks in pipes, receiving instant notifications and alerts. Predictive technologies also ensure dam operators get early warnings and watch over the water availability in each reservoir. Making it particularly helpful for irrigation purposes.
A smart solution can also give you remote control access over the movements and closures of gates, so that there’s no need to deploy physical staff on the site in extreme weather conditions like floods or storms. The smart system can decide autonomously when the water reaches a certain level, whether to open or close the gates.
Key benefits
- Real-time 24/7 water level monitoring
- Better dams
- Enhanced dam reliability and predictive maintenance
- Faster decisions
- Saving cost and resources
- Reducing human involvement
An early-stage ideation with smart innovators and entrepreneurs can help build a functional working prototype that’s ready to leave the nest.
Smart Water Management for agriculture and farming
The population explosion in recent decades, the pandemic, and future food shortages are factors of concern. Changing food consumption patterns is slowly leading to increasing demand for global crop production and that requires sustainable water usage. Water scarcity can negatively affect the yields as much as an onset of drought, or a water oversupply. IoT is helping to make these processes more efficient, judicious, and smart than ever before.
A smart water management system for agriculture and farming using IoT can significantly improve crop fields providing farmers with oversight to avoid water wastage. Sensors monitor and multiple parameter checks, like temperature, humidity, and soil moisture can help calculate crop’s ideal water needs. These embedded sensors are connected to the field and sprinklers in sprinkler irrigation systems, and farmers can receive regular updates and notifications directly on their smartphones.
With AI on board, the future of agriculture can be planned wisely. Crop water management using IoT can help farmers use less water for the same needs. Smart technology also enables them to rely on fertilizers, and save power supply on pumping and irrigation involving less water while saving time and cutting costs on labor. IoT solutions also make it possible to overlook existing water levels in tanks.
Key benefits
- Boosting productivity of agriculture
- Better quality management
- Preventing undue water wastage
- Efficient water usage, and managing steady power supplies.
- Automation
- Optimized farms
Perspectives
With such expansive and varied use cases, the prospects and potentials of smart water technologies is evident to see. Having optimistic estimates on the smart water management market value is too developing rapidly.
Some of the key factors driving this smart water market include implementing newer laws and regulations on reducing overall water consumption and setting goals to meet sustainability objectives. Sustainable water-related standards, in particular, ensure local municipal authorities and water suppliers provide clean, safe and high-quality water. For example, the Safe Drinking Water Act enforces the standards for clean drinking water quality in the US. IoT technology can potentially help companies comply with this and many other such regulations while achieving 100% sustainability goals.
Afterword – IoT and water management
An IoT-based smart water management system definitely brings forth transparency and optimized control throughout the entire water supply chain, helping out several industries and cities to use healthy and clean water optimally and judiciously while following all requisite regulations. With IoT capabilities in place, collecting and recycling wastewater can be successfully achieved.
There is a need for a trusted IoT consultant to assist you in optimizing water production, distribution, and consumption.
Conclusion
Water scarcity is said to directly affect nearly 20% of the human population by the year 2025, according to several UN reports, and can potentially indirectly influence the rest of the global ecosystems, inhabitants as well as economies.
Smart water systems based on IoT, big data, and AI technologies can help slow down these degenerations and undo the damage the imprudent and wasteful usage of existing water resources has already caused.
Smart water systems can positively impact consumption, and conservation and maintain the quality of water resources available.
Technosphere designs smart IoT products and industry-specific IoT solutions including IoT connectivity solutions. powered by deploying enhanced It offers system integration, machine learning, sensors, and embedded technologies to help improve any businesses across multiple verticals. to generate growth, and retain stability and competition. Its reliable and secure data aggregation and seamless cloud connectivity help support IoT data analysis and utilization ready for any successful product implementations.
Incorporated in 2013, Technosphere has offices based in Bangalore, India, and Dallas, USA. It is promoted by industry leaders in electronics and product development engineering and has a successful industry record of developing IoT products and solutions.