Non-revenue water costs South Africa millions in lost revenue and increases stress on our water systems. Are there ways to stop the waste and secure water for the country’s future?
Non-revenue water is water and money down the drain: clean water that goes missing without municipalities or water utilities receiving a cent for their efforts. The water often disappears through leaks, water theft, or inaccurate meter readings, costing towns and cities millions in lost revenue and adding extra strain on water resources.
SA’s water stresses
Lost water is a big problem for South Africa. Almost half of our clean, potable water goes missing, a staggering amount of lost water and revenue. It’s particularly concerning given SA’s water profile: even though the country receives reasonable amounts of rainfall, these showers are unevenly distributed, leaving some major urban areas very reliant on underground groundwater or pumping water across long distances. Several areas in SA are prone to drought, and cities struggle to keep pace with rapid urban growth.
South Africans are exploring creative solutions to help reduce water shortages, such as water recycling, rainwater capture, aquifer and wetland rehabilitation, and desalination. But by far, the easier gains come from addressing leaks and theft.
Fortunately, there are proven solutions that tackle NRW challenges and turn the situation around, says Chetan Mistry, Strategy and Marketing Manager at Xylem Africa;
“Non-revenue water is a challenge, but it’s also an attainable win for towns and cities, and modernises existing water systems. Several municipalities, such as the Midvaal and Cape Town regions, have started to reduce their NRW losses and add more revenue into their coffers. They are combining planning, technology, and partnerships, and are seeing turnarounds in just a few years. That’s possible because they don’t need to reinvent what they are doing. A wealth of NRW remedies have been developed worldwide and adapted to local conditions by skilled water professionals.”
Proven NRW reduction strategies
The big picture of addressing NRW can seem complicated. However, several strategies each create gains and efficiencies and modernise established water investments.
Municipalities quickly start seeing results when they apply these interventions:
- Leak detection: Leaks are the main culprits of lost water, but they can be hard to detect, especially if they are underground or due to microscopic pipe fractures. Acoustic leak detection systems such as Xylem’s free-swimming SmartBall technology detect leaks of all sizes, even micro-fractures, providing pinpoint maintenance and replacement without disturbing the larger water network.
- Pipeline assessments: A step above leak detection, pipeline assessments evaluate extensive pipeline networks without disruption for potential and existing problems that lead to water losses. While traditional assessments are typically very disruptive, requiring shutting down large parts of a network, modern technologies enable real-time assessments in an operational network. A leading example is Pure Technologies’ PipeDiver, a free-swimming, articulated assessment platform that moves effortlessly through active pipelines to identify wall defects and prevent leaks before they develop.
- Pressure and flow data: Leaks can go unnoticed for days and weeks, but machine intelligence can spot leak patterns and predict future failures. Smart sensors actively gather data from water systems, reporting changes such as flow and pressure drops, and feed them into a water data platform. Xylem Vue is a comprehensive and secure cloud-native water data platform that ingests current data and historical operational data to give planners and managers a clear picture.
- Combat water theft: Water theft robs communities of reliable water delivery. Utilities can combat water theft in several ways, such as offering channels where communities can easily report leaks and theft. They can also use aggregated data that flags potential theft through central management dashboards. Technologies such as the Avensor digital products create intelligent monitoring and control from water networks; utilities can set consumption thresholds and alarms, including direct notifications through SMS to water authorities.
- Accurate water readings: Municipalities often lose water because of inaccurate meter readings and erroneous billing. Old mechanical water meters become wildly inaccurate as they age. They don’t provide enough intelligence for planning and predictive analytics, and rely heavily on manual reporting, which takes time and causes inaccurate numbers. New devices such as Sensus Smart Static Water Meters integrate with established water systems and remove errors through automated readings. Utility employees can work much faster using drive-by wireless devices communicating with the meters.
- Integrated water systems: Digital water systems reduce the need to replace current systems, instead helping enhance them through data collection and adding smart devices at critical points in water networks. These systems can measure flow, pressure, pollution, and various metrics, ingesting current data from the network and using past data to identify historical patterns. Utilities have actionable visibility when using a central business intelligence platform tailored to water applications—even on tablets and smartphones in the field. Xylem’s people and partners have extensive experience working with water utilities to design and deploy integrated water systems for quick results.
The best way to combat non-revenue water is to improve operational visibility by using smart sensor and metering technologies, advanced leak detection, and real-time information about the water network’s performance. When municipalities apply these steps along with an NRW reduction strategy, they experience double-digit percentage reductions in water losses.
Don’t wait until the taps or coffers run dry. Reducing non-revenue water with proven strategies, technologies, and partnerships with water leaders such as Xylem delivers consistent and permanent long-term wins.