Water Meters receive new digital lease of life to promote efficiency

We teamed up with NWL to develop a first-of-a-kind technology that makes water metering relevant in a connected society. We first conceived the idea to extend their existing water meters’ capabilities at the NWL Innovation Festival in 2019 as a response to an open challenge to reduce inefficiencies in water consumption. This plays a vital role in protecting the environment, reducing bills and securing future supply for an increasing population.

Water meters are usually read every six-months by residents or by dispatching ‘man-in-a-van’. This is inconvenient for customers and inefficient for NWL, who are committed to reducing environmental impact and capturing crucial leakage information.

We deployed Jellyfish to up-cycle their existing water meters into smart devices, by enabling daily communication of property water meter readings.

Gary Adams, Smart Metering Lead at NWL said:

“B4T’s Jellyfish device has been modified to exploit short-range radio transmissions, usually used by technicians to read the meter during manual visits to each property in what is known as ‘drive-by’ automatic meter reading (AMR). Jellyfish captures multiple meters and catapults data, long-range over Advance Meter Infrastructure (AMI) to NWL.”

Alex Barter, CEO B4T said:

“Our challenge is cost-driven and environmentally crucial. Evolving Jellyfish to take the man-out-of-the-van had to be more than viable, it had to be bold. We’ve made step-changes in our IoT technologies to support NWL’s ambitious environmental and customer commitments.”

The AMI capability uses publicly available 0G network technology that keeps costs low with devices battery-powered for up to 15 years.