Measuring water consumption is important, not just for cost recovery, but also for monitoring and controlling water usage, especially in a water-scarce region like South Africa.

The HPI d-school Building has various smart water meters installed throughout the building, which are connected to the same central monitoring system as the energy meters.

These are used to extract data on water usage of the building, which the building manager can then use to identify trends, areas of excessive consumption and out-of-hours operation of systems to make informed decisions for continuous improvement of the water efficiency of the building.

In addition, by monitoring the water consumption in a building and observing hourly usage overnight, patterns can be identified that can quickly indicate a leak, eliminating the need to visually inspect all water fixtures in a building to determine the cause and to automatically notify the building manager for immediate action.