After a successful eight years of saving water and money for its rural customers, GWMWater is preparing for round two of its rural digital metering program with Taggle.
GWMWater was one of the first Victorian water corporations to implement wide-scale digital water metering to enhance the customer experience and improve network management.
As part of the Rural Pipeline Intelligence Project in 2015-16, GWMWater rolled out 14,000 digital meters and a customer portal to its rural service area.
As these devices are now approaching their end of life, planning is underway for their replacement.
The next generation of digital meters have a conditional battery life of 15 years, further strengthening the business case that was already well-proven during the first deployment.
Furthermore, GWMWater has also implemented the technology across its urban footprint, allowing all customers to benefit from accessing their water consumption data. There are a total of 47,500 digital meters installed across GWMWater’s rural and urban water networks.
Rural water management
Water is precious for rural customers as they generally have larger properties with livestock and crops. Leaks and breaks are common due to shifting soils and damage from livestock, so having access to hourly water consumption data and leak alerts is extremely valuable.
Additional functionality was added to the standard Taggle customer portal, which allows rural customers to track water use against their water allowances – thereby enabling them to make adjustments or trade water as necessary.
The portal also enabled rural landholders to ensure water was running through meters in remote paddocks, without having to physically check them. It also alerted them to potential leaks where water should not be passing through the meter, which was a valuable tool for the community to help save water and money. Rural customers with multiple meters across vast geographic areas have reported that the portal, and specifically the leak alerts, are an asset, saving them both time and money.
Brian Barry, a farmer from Manangatang, said, “My wife logs in to check every now and again, but the leak alert came through as a text message. The meter is placed in an obscure place so it was great to be alerted because if I didn’t see it, it would have continued for a long time. Usually, I don’t have a lot of trust in new technology but it worked very, very well.”
GWMWater serves a geographic spread of 62,000km2, which is about 30 per cent of Victoria. This creates a challenge when updating infrastructure, however once it is complete, the benefit of not having to regularly visit the meters for another 15 years will be well worth the effort.
For more information, visit taggle.com.au
