06 April 2022

Severn Trent Water has started a £20m IoT (internet of things) rollout of smart water meters across Coventry, with a planned total of 157,000 installations by the end of March 2025.

The aim is to gain real-time information of both customer water use to make sure billing is always as accurate as possible, as well as helping to curb the problem of water leaks across its physical network. The timeline for the project aligns with a cycle in the UK water sector called AMP, or asset management period, a five-year agreement between water companies and the industry regulator on pricing and investment commitments.

The project is also part of Severn Trent Water’s already announced £566m ‘Green Recovery’ program, which also involves the replacement of lead pipes in 25,000 businesses and homes, as well as other measures.

The company, which provides water services to 3.7 million properties within the Midlands, has also commissioned a new large-scale, carrier-grade LoRaWAN (long range wide area) communications network to support the IoT application.

“In practice, the system will encompass meter units at the boundary of a customer property which will connect to the data communications network, transmitting data as a daily payload from the meter to the network,” said Anthony Hickinbottom, green recovery project lead, Severn Trent Water. “This data will then be ingested into Severn Trent Water systems to analyse water usage within our network so planners will have a true picture of how much water it puts into the network to service customers, who are a mixture of households and business and public sector users. A key deliverable will be a new level of detail of how much actually makes it to its proper, paid-for destination.”

Vendors providing the equipment for the project are UK-based smart city infrastructure provider Connexin and a specialist smart meter manufacturer, US supplier Itron.