A typical water network contains various brands and sizes of water meters installed at various geographical locations to serve domestic, non-domestic and bulk supply customers. In most countries, these meters are read manually which lack effectiveness and accuracy. At various occasions, erroneous meter reading leads to adjustments, delays and omissions in billing as well as collection. This translates further into commercial losses, cash flow problems, wrong management decisions and, above all, customer dissatisfaction.

The IOT revolution is motivating water authorities to automate the production, transmission, distribution and supply of water in order to solve several problems mentioned above. However it needs huge investment especially when existing water meters have years of product life left in them. SciFlair has developed a retrofit solution for existing meters which is general purpose and capable of acquiring metering data and send it to the central office using multiple communication technologies.

SciFlair Automatic Water Meter Reading solution is based on a low power Internet of Things (IOT) sensor node. The battery powered unit, based on SLX242 expansion, interfaces with Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) enabled water meters and sends metering data to SciFlair Axino cloud. The use of SM01 series communication module inside SLX242 means that water meters can be connected using GSM, MESH, WIFI, SIGFOX, LORA or ETHERNET offering a wide range of communication technologies to be unified in any installation scenario.

A custom written web based application serves as AMR head end solution to configure and maintain meter reading devices, interface units and communication infrastructure for all meter locations.