Investigation of residential water consumption events based on pressure data

Smart metering technologies are among the key contributions to the digital revolution in the water sector, primarily aimed at providing water consumption data at higher time resolution (daily or hourly) compared to the traditional meters. Although smart flow meters facilitate the gathering of water consumption data, technical limitations (e.g. battery life) may hinder their practical applications when it comes to obtaining data at very high time resolution (1 min or 1 sec, i.e. the resolution required for the characterization of water end uses). As an alternative to traditional flow-based approaches, this paper presents an innovative method for estimating water consumption events by relying only on pressure data observed at two sections of the user inlet pipe. The proposed method exploits the pressure-flowrate relationship to estimate the household water-consumption time series, while distinguishing between internal and external water-use events. The application of the proposed method to a real case study – subjected to 1-s resolution pressure monitoring for approximately a month and a half – shows method's efficacy in obtaining the time series of the flowrate entering the user and identifying water-consumption events and their characteristics.