Application of Water Consumption Smart Metering for Water Loss Assessment: A Case Study

Thanks to the advancement of ICT technology, water consumption smart metering is nowadays becoming more popular. Indeed, smart meters can provide several advantages to a water utility such as an easier definition of the bill cost, detection of losses within the buildings and evaluation of leakage rates at DMA level. This paper focuses on this latter aspect, and an application to a real case study is described. It refers to Gorino Ferrarese (FE, Italy), where no tanks are present and where the water balance for leakage assessment between smart metered users water consumption time series and net DMA inflow time series is performed. Sensitivity of the procedure to the lack of different numbers of user water consumption time series is also evaluated. The results highlighted that, for the case study considered and with proper selection of the users, just monitoring 60% of the users would lead to an error in the estimation of the daily total water consumption, and thus in the closing of the water balance, lower than 2%. Thus, even without a complete coverage of all the DMA users, water consumption smart metering can represent a valuable tool for water loss assessment.