Internet of Things: More Than Just Protected Plumbing

The man who was looking over the water gauges could not believe what he was seeing …

Just down the street, a few miles from his small control room, the giant tank that contained Robinson Township’s municipal water supply was running out … quickly.

He looked at the clock. Midnight. The thermometer recorded an icy temperature of 20 degrees. Somewhere out of the 15 square miles of snow-covered neighborhoods and businesses in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, a water pipe was losing more than 3,000 gallons of water per minute.

He checked his dials again and made some quick calculations. The township storage tank contained 1 million gallons of water. At this rate, everything would be gone before dawn.

But where did the water flow exactly? Where was the pipe break?

He had no idea.

The answer came five hours later.

A ruptured water line in the city’s shopping district drained most of the township supply and left six inches of standing water on the floor of a nearby Toys “R” Us (not to mention, with little water available for the day, he forced schools to close).

You read about it all the time. The ruptures of water pipes are a reality of all the cities of the country.

Where are they?

This is where one of the major investment trends – the Internet of Things (IoT) – is having an increasing impact.

IoT to the rescue

What if you could place sensors in underground water pipes, fire hydrants and elsewhere in a piping system, each transmitting data to the city’s water department?

Collect dozens or hundreds of these sensors, spreading information minute by minute on flow rates and water pressure. The location of a 1 million gallon water line break in the middle of the night is no longer a mystery.

Most breaks, however, are not so dramatic or obvious.

Think of a pin leak in an underground water pipe. There could be a tiny amount of water, tens or hundreds of gallons a day. But add up all these leaks in a network of pipes hundreds of miles long and you talk about a lot of wasted H2O.

For example, the Philadelphia Water Service pumps 250 million gallons of water into its municipal system every day. According to experts, about a quarter of the water never reaches companies and residences located at the other end of its pipes. That’s 60 million gallons of water lost today. And tomorrow. And the next day

Until recently, good luck trying to find even a small part of these leaks. It’s like trying to find a needle in a pile of needles.

Unless you have the IoT.

Fueling new efficiencies

You can imagine how precious water is in a place like Las Vegas. Well, the area’s water district has recently installed internet-connected sensors on the underground water lines in the center of the Las Vegas Strip.

The devices monitor the physical integrity of the walls of the pipe in real time. These efforts helped the water district identify more than 1,600 leaks in its system and save nearly 300 million gallons of water.

It’s just a water system. Remember that the United States has more than 150,000 water authorities in cities, counties and regions. This represents a saving of water (and money as well).

The Internet of Things is not just about detecting leaks in water pipes. But this only demonstrates in a way the growing use of IoT and why it’s a mega investable trend.

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