An automated water metering, billing and monitoring system.

Abstract

Water supply is the booming businesses in the world today since: it involves supplying of water which is an essential and basic need' to the general public. This- business carried out by water utility operates who are vested with task of extracting this resource from a- raw water source, treating it and supplying it to the customers. Most water distribution companies do not sustainably manage. this resource due to low technological advancement and thus follow the conventional water meter reading and billing this follows a manual process where agents Of the utility physically visit the. premises of the users -and manually record the consumption data-- for bill development and delivery for payment, This is inefficient since human- errors and estimation of customers consumption information can be made during meter reading and also a -lot of-time and money is invested by the company during this process. The process also being manual, it has aided theft of water by bypassing the meter. In the case .of leakages, water lost in due process goes unnoticed. An Automated Water Metering, Billing, and Monitoring System that automatically takes meter readings at customers' homes and transmits them to office where the billings are prepared eradicates this problem. With this, the, customers are given due notification of their water consumption bills through text messages having their corresponding amount to be paid. Payments ate issued as usual through the bank, mobile money services, etc. and in case the bill is not paid within the grace period, the system automatically disconnects the customer. Once- the bill is paid including the connection charge¾ the. reconnection is done automatically. In case of monitoring, the system defects leakages and. illegal connections in dead end water networks and then notifies the operators in- office of where the problems are. This system eradicates estimated meter readings, errors made by mechanical meters due to wrong calibration of being faulty and human errors during taking of the customers' readings. It fastens the process of metering and billing, enables. quick notification of leakage points to the service provider and enables an overall better management of the service by the service provider.