With a landmark 100,000 devices already deployed, South East Water is embarking on the largest smart water metering program in Australia.
As climate change, population growth and cost-of-living increases put pressure on utilities to find more efficient ways to manage and use water, the water industry is turning to digitisation for the solution. In this pivotal time, South East Water is braving uncharted territory with the mass rollout of digital meters across its entire network. By 2029, the utility aims to replace all analogue devices with advanced NB-IoT meters that incorporate leak detection sensors.
With close to 100,000 devices already installed, the digital metering program is now in its final phase. Its goal is to leverage data insights to deliver better outcomes for the community and the environment, as well as South East Water’s network and operations.
South East Water Acting General Manager Digital Utility, Mark Elvins, said the project is underpinned by the utility’s vision to innovate with purpose and act with care.
“We’re dealing with dynamic challenges in the water industry,” Mr Elvins said.
“We needed to drive fundamental shifts to the way we approach these emerging challenges and our vision gives us license to do that.”
The road to water security
South East Water’s digital transformation journey started more than a decade ago as a way to empower customers with more information about how and when they use water.
While the utility’s first digital meter trials began in 2010, South East Water Group Manager, DU Programs and Process
Transformation, Kenneth Lowe, said that it was in 2015–16 that South East Water really started to look at how it could replace its ageing fleet of mechanical meters with more advanced technology.
“The challenge when you’re an early adopter of a new technology is that you’re learning lessons for the first time as you introduce that technology,” Mr Lowe said.
Given these initial trials showed promising results, the project moved into its core capability phase in 2018. This next step was taken in partnership with Yarra Valley Water and Greater Western Water and saw South East Water deploy 10,000 meters under the Digital Capability Pilot.
“In 2020, we felt more confident with the technology and were able to start rolling out meters in much larger volumes,” Mr Lowe said.
“We hit about 20,000 meters by 2022 and that’s where we really started to pick up the pace on the rollout. From the lessons in that core capability phase, we identified the capabilities we need to build in our organisation, and what we need from the technology.”
During the build-and-scale phase from 2022–24, those 20,000 meters quickly became 30,000 and then 40,000, with South East Water on track to reach 100,000 meters by the end of 2024.
It was also during this period that South East Water developed the business case for the final phase – the mass rollout of one million meters across its entire network.
“The business case was one of the most reviewed in South East Water’s history,” Mr Lowe said.
“It went through three external reviews, multiple board reviews, the Essential Services Commission (ESC), Department of Treasury and Finance (DTF), the water ministry and, finally, two state ministers signed off on the business case in January 2023. This allowed us to get ready for the mass rollout, which kicked off on 31 July 2024.”
With the final stage now underway, the digital field services team used all the key lessons from the previous phases to build a strategy for the mass rollout.
South East Water Delivery Manager, Digital Field Services, Katy Henley, said one of the unexpected challenges the team encountered was managing the extra works required in the field to replace meters that have been concreted in or built over.
“The time it takes to rectify those works will have an impact on us being able to continually keep deploying, which is part of our strategy,” she said.
“We don’t want to break the business. We don’t want to go into an area where there’s high usage and get a lot of leak alarms that are going to overload our call centre. We balanced it to suit everyone and we do spread deployments each quarter.
“We’ve done a whole weighting of priorities, and we plan the meter exchanges accordingly so it’s spread where we want to go geographically and across a mix of residential and business customers.”
Innovation at scale
Through its in-house research and development team and commercial arm, Iota, South East Water has designed and deployed its own fit-for-purpose ultrasonic digital meters and an enterprise Internet of Things (IoT) platform to digitally manage its assets and services.
One of the crucial considerations for the program, Mr Lowe said, was looking at how South East Water could scale up its existing systems to support the data collected by the meters.
“We recognised very early on, before we developed our business case, that for any device that leverages NB-IoT, there is a need for an IoT platform,” he said.
“South East Water embarked on a journey with our partner Iota to develop a platform that would bring the data from all these devices in the field, process it and then distribute it to various systems so that they’re not overloaded with too much data.
“This gives us a lot of flexibility to integrate with billing, metering, asset management and customer service, and then gives these systems information they need at a pace that doesn’t overload the system.”
Empowering customers
While the benefits of advanced metering are felt throughout every level of the business, South East Water put customers at the heart of this journey.
“We’re constantly seeking feedback from our customers, both before we start and through the process to ensure that we’re meeting their needs,” Mr Elvins said.
“If they have thoughts, preferences or concerns, then we’re managing them proactively, rather than waiting for complaints. We’ve established the program to be truly customer-focused, and that creates the necessity, more than anything else, for us to be actively listening to our customers.
“We’re in a privileged position to provide a service to the community and we don’t take that lightly. We want to provide the best possible experience we can, wherever we can.”
The new digital meters give South East Water’s customers access to near real-time data about their water consumption via the mySouthEastWater portal, giving them greater control over their usage and helping them save water and money.
The data from the meters also allows South East Water to help customers fight leaks on their side of the meter.
According to South East Water Group Manager, Digital Field Services, Ash Walsh, customer-side leaks would often go undetected for months until customers received a much larger bill than expected.
“When this happened, there’d be an investigation that kicks off and we’d often give customers money back and say, ‘You didn’t know about the leak, so we’ll help you out’,” he said.
“Now, within 24 to 48 hours we can identify what we call a continuous flow at a property, which just means the meter hasn’t gone back to zero and there’s always been water going through.
“We’re then able to send a text message or an email to let customers know that they’ve had a leak, when it started, how big it is and how much it’ll cost.”
When a digital meter detects a consistent water flow for 24 hours (if it exceeds 120L) or continuous flow for seven days, the enterprise IoT system will generate an alert. This sends a message to the customer with some steps to help them identify the cause of the potential leak as soon as possible.
While many customers are able to respond to these leaks quickly, not all are not in a position to do so. South East Water identified that uncertainty around repair costs was a major barrier for these customers, so it also established a process where customers can access a free virtual leak audit from its plumbing partner, thereby empowering them to make an informed decision. These leak notifications have so far saved nearly 1.5 billion litres of water, and $6.3 million on customers’ bills.
Fighting network leaks
In addition to detecting leaks on customer properties, data from the meters also allows South East Water to manage its network assets. The sensors in the digital meters can pick up vibrations in the network, as they’re physically connected to the metal pipework.
“By analysing vibration data from the digital meters, we are able to infer where we may have leaks within our network,” Mr Elvins said.
“Through our data analytics platform, we can pinpoint potential leaks, the severity of the leak, and the likely duration of the leak until it becomes a burst.
“While we only kicked off the test-and-learn phase of the network leaks program in February 2024, it’s exceeding all our expectations and is able to detect leaks that we may never have found through other means.
“Our business case didn’t forecast any savings in FY23–24, but after reviewing the results, we’ve found real savings of around 140ML within the first five months,” Mr Elvins said.
Collecting this data has also allowed South East Water to gain new insights into how its assets operate and how faults can be managed more efficiently.
“When it comes to non-revenue water, our overall is 14 per cent, with a large proportion of that figure attributed to water loss through bursts and leaks. The vibration meter helps us find leaks faster and fix them quicker,” Mr Walsh said.
“We’ve also got better data, so we can understand more about the water being used in different areas across our network and we can use better predictive analytics.”
While a project of this scale is not without challenges, Ms Henley said overcoming them boils down to having a strong vision and an organisational structure that allows smart people to come up with new ideas.
“The key thing is the organisation in general does love innovation because, without it, we couldn’t do what we’re doing,” she said.
“It’s not just for us; we’re taking that leap for the water industry so that everyone can benefit from this digital rollout. The industry in general is great. They’re very collaborative, which is such a nice space to be in.”
Innovation is not without risk, of course, but Mr Elvins hopes the risks South East Water is taking now can benefit the water sector in the future.
“We hope that this journey shows the broader industry what’s possible when you do take a leap,” he said.
“We’re really happy to be the trailblazers on this one and find all the problems along the way so that our peers can hopefully follow after us and not make the same mistakes.”
Featured image: a digital meter installed at Caulfield South, Victoria. Image: South East Water.