Pressure dependent piped water theft detection with IOT based remote billing and location alert

Water distribution authorities face tremendous challenges in delivering clean and safe water to clients. In trying to fulfill their mandate, they are faced with the problem of water theft in form of meter tampering, meter reversals, meter bypass, and illegal connections. Various research initiatives have been undertaken to address the problem. Therefore this study focuses on utilizing the variation of dynamic pressure along water distribution pipelines caused by illegal connections in a given pressure zone to develop a theft detection system with remote billing and location based alerting using IOT and GSM based technologies respectively. In this method, two Arduino microcontrollers were programed in Arduino and interfaced with two flow rate sensors, GSM modem and Ethernet shield W5100 connecting the system to a web application served by a web database on a computer. The results show that any form of activity that leads to pressure variations and also interfere with normal piped water distribution can be detected and reported via an SMS. On the basis that pressure within a given pressure zone is maintained within a certain range, the system can accurately detect and report water theft.