Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
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"It's just snowballed into trying to solve as many of the challenges that the water companies have as possible." In November last year, around 10 devices were installed in employees' houses to test their effectiveness in a live setting for the first time. The testing has proved successful and, at a special event at The Gherkin in London on 24 January, SES Water and Creative EC presented a live stream from one of those pilot instal- lations to show the product in action. Representatives from water companies all around Britain were invited to the event and tasked with identifying as yet uniden- tified uses for the technology. "In the water industry, I cannot recall any time when we've got so many differ- ent companies together to discuss poten- tial solutions to a problem and how can we build this solution together," Heath says. "People picked up so many use cases with the sensor technology we've got at the moment." Creative EC's Riddles adds: "People in the workshops talked about backflow, and how water conducts electricity at different rates depending how pure it is – there's all these sensors that could link into this unit wirelessly in the future. By just hav- ing a Bluetooth chip inside, sensors that we haven't yet built or even imagined can be plugged in." Identifying additional uses for the technology also has implications for the cost-benefit analysis. The device is cur- rently expected to cost water companies around £300 a unit, with a managed service from around 5p per day. While the final cost model has yet to be determined, there may be a relatively says. "The actual device itself is fantastic and has been an amazing success, but it's been an incredible learning process in terms of what you do with the data, work- ing out what we want to see and being able to provide it in a way that's useful for the water companies and the customers." While there is still work to be done to explore the potential benefits, Heath is confident that it is already capable of making a major impact. "At the very least, it will transform our networks and our understanding of data with the pressure information and the insight on customers," says Heath. "At the very most, you will change customer behaviour throughout the country, and overusing water will become as socially unacceptable as smoking in a pub. "People will no longer boast about how powerful their shower is – they will want to hide it, because they will suddenly be aware of how much water is pouring down the drain. This is that change where suddenly a customer understands how much a shower uses and its relationship with their water bill. That's game-changing." straightforward solution. With Waterfall's ability to allow customers to shut off supply in the case of significant leaks – as well as freeze-thaw events – it is already attracting interest from the insurance in- dustry, which pays out an estimated £2.5 million every day across Britain to rectify water-damaged properties. "If we get buy-in from the regulator, they might allow the water company to put the bill up for all the homes in its region by £1 or £2 a month to cover the technology," Riddles says. "The home owner has to pay out more but, because we've got insurance in the loop, that's going to help us reduce insurance costs. I think for every £2 a utility might charge a homeowner, insurance is offering reductions of more than £2 – they're talking about 5 or 10 per cent policy cost reduction." Over the coming months, the team will work to establish a more comprehensive library of signatures and look into tweaks to the product before seeking to install it in customers' homes from the summer. "For the three months we've been pi- loting it, we've not had a single issue," Ali www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | MARCH 2019 | 29 The app interface showing water use can be easily understood by customers Jeremy Heath, Innovation Manager at SES Water, has supported the technology's development