Nairobi Water targets big consumers with smart meters

The Nairobi Water and Sewerage Company (NWSC) is planning to invest Sh1 billion in the next three years to install smart meters that could help cut fraud in its billing system and enable it to tap the revenue it needs to improve supply.

The devices, to be initially installed for the top 10,000 water users, will record the amount of water consumed and remotely — through mobile and radio networks — convey the information back to centralised servers.

The list of top water consumers includes beer maker Kenya Breweries Limited, the University of Nairobi, Kenyatta National Hospital and soft drinks maker Coca-Cola.

NWSC aims to connect 90,000 of its quarter of a million customers to the smart meters in five years, hoping to rid its system of illegal connections and inaccurate billings.

“We have placed an international tender for the smart meters and hope to kick-start the project as planned,” said Philip Gichuki, the NWSC managing director.

“The smart meters will help us keep track of peak consumption hours and amounts, flow rates and water pressure.”

The devices, Mr Gichuki said, will also generate consumption data to be used in detecting leaks and water diversions remotely and in real time.

The plans are contained in a draft report that the utility firm has prepared and will soon present to the industry regulator, seeking approval to increase water tariffs in the county by up to 100 per cent.

READ: Nairobi users hit hardest by planned rise in cost of water

The report shows that the Nairobi water firm has budgeted to spend Sh100 million on the smart meters project this financial year and to spend an additional Sh300 million each year for the next three years to fundamentally change water billing system.

The water firm has also set aside Sh42 million to install electromagnetic flow meters to facilitate remote metering. On average, one smart meter costs about $1,000 (Sh86,000), but prices differ depending on the technology that is used to send information back to the servers.

The average meter of 0.5 inches used by most Kenyan consumers costs around Sh8,500, according to Davis & Shirtliff, a water technology firm.

Smart meters either log, record consumption on pre-set intervals while others record data after a certain amount of water, for instance, one litre has been consumed.

The water company’s plan is to have meters that channel larger amounts of data connected using Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) technology, meaning each meter will be fitted with a SIM card.

Smaller meters will make use of free radio frequencies to automatically transmit data.

“These high-tech gadgets are tamper-proof,” said Mr Gichuki. “If anybody tries to interfere with them, they automatically send a signal to the server notifying us that there is a problem.”

Though it could significantly reduce revenue leakage that is rampant with manual reading of meters, the smart meters could, like their electricity counterparts did, render the more than 400 meter reading jobs redundant.

The Nairobi water company has a large number of employees tasked with reading meters through door-to-door visits every month. Another set of employees prepare and post the bills to the firm’s 250,000 customers.

Studies have shown that corruption is most rampant among field officers who collude with customers to either log in fewer units of water than was actually consumed or cover up illegal connections.

Rampant corruption has also seen customers get erroneous bills at the end of the month, leading to delayed payments. It is estimated that about 38 per cent of the water supplied by NWSC is not billed having been consumed through illegal connections in informal settlements.

The utility firm says such technological interventions will go a long way in helping it reduce such losses to 16 per cent in three years, saving it about Sh1 billion. The company’s annual billing currently stands at about Sh7.2 billion.

The large-scale deployment of smart meter plan comes three years after the utility firm piloted pre-paid water meters in selected city estates like Makadara, Jericho and Harambee. So far, the company has installed around 350 smart meters.

The meters are equipped with indicators that will warn customers when their water units are running low. When the units are completely consumed, an internal valve automatically closes, disconnecting supply.

NWSC is adopting smart meters at a time when studies show their use is on the rise globally. Navigant Research, a global research firm, says the number of smart water meters installed worldwide is expected to hit 153 million by 2022.

The firm estimates that unit shipments of smart meters and their communications gadgets will grow from 7.6 million last year to 17.3 million annually by 2022.

“Smart meters are the spearhead for many, but not all smart water network deployments,” the research firm says in a report.

“Other forms of monitoring – including leak detection, pressure management and water quality monitoring – are also becoming an integrated part of real-time data network for water operations.”