Spark IoT, Iota partner to enable smart water meter management

Spark IoT (Internet of Things) has announced a partnership with Iota, a subsidiary of South East Water (the water authority for the South East of Melbourne in Australia) to bring its enterprise IoT platform Lentic® and a new generation of smart water meter technology to local councils and water utilities in Aotearoa.

In Australia, Iota is well progressed in a project to deploy 70,000 smart water meters for the Toowoomba Regional Council in Queensland. The meters and associated data will be managed by Lentic®, Iota’s fit-for-water IoT enterprise platform to give the Council accurate data and real-time water usage updates as well as early detection of customer leaks, leading to water savings and improved planning decisions.

The Lentic solution is a key pillar in the Councils digital transition as they embrace IoT and the integration of data across various enterprise systems to provide valuable insights, help residents monitor water usage, and enable the Council to proactively manage its water network.

Philippe Boulanger, Spark IoT Growth Lead says IoT and other high-tech solutions are a natural enabler in helping local councils and communities in Aotearoa to more effectively manage water as an essential resource, “As we continue to face the impacts of climate change and more frequent and extreme weather events, it is critical to better understand how precious natural resources such as water is sourced, treated, and distributed. Advanced digital technologies such as IoT is an important enabler of these processes due to near real-time monitoring and detection capabilities of these devices over a dedicated, nationwide NB-IoT network. IoT is now reaching a level of maturity where they have the potential to solve important challenges where it wasn’t possible in the past.”

Daniel Sullivan, Iota CEO says, “As water authorities deploy large numbers of IoT devices to monitor water and wastewater networks, it is critical to manage the devices and to be able to trust the unprecedented volumes of data coming in. Lentic is the enterprise IoT platform designed by a water utility, with in-built rules and alarms to validate the data and support the many different use cases such as automated customer leak notifications. Water is our most precious resource, and the best way we can protect it is to be able to accurately monitor it and the networks in which it flows.”

Last year, Spark IoT also announced a partnership with GreenBe, an Australian cloud-based customer engagement solution, which utilises data from Lentic to display consumption dashboards for customers and notifications when water usage goes beyond a certain threshold. Lentic and Greenbe are effectively deployed by the Toowoomba Regional Council for their smart water meter program.