IoT Systems Helps Stadtwerke Wolfsberg Build Smart Water Grid Using AWS

Stadtwerke Wolfsberg is the municipal council of Wolfsberg in Austria, a region in the south of the country spanning 279 square kilometers. The council is responsible for providing public services, including water and wastewater management, broadband infrastructure, and garbage collection, to a population of about 25,000 people. Stadtwerke Wolfsberg leaders were researching how innovative technology could improve its public services and had been in discussions with different technology suppliers. However, it was drawn to a proposal by local AWS Partner IoT Systems, to build a long-range, wide-area network (LoRaWAN) that had the potential to be used for a diverse range of projects.

In 2021, the council agreed to run a proof of concept (PoC) to explore how LoRaWAN technology could be used to provide the greatest public benefit. It tested several use cases before determining that the technology could transform its water management system. This is an important issue for the council, which had for some time been looking for new ways to conserve water and adopt more sustainable practices. Around 1.5 million liters of water were being wasted every year due to leakage and poor management, and the council needed a more accurate way to monitor water usage and find leaks fast.

IoT Systems partnered with a European telecoms supplier to create the LoRaWAN network and Stadtwerke Wolfsberg used a third-party supplier to build its smart water meters. Work started in January 2022 and took 3 months to complete. “IoT systems offered us a combined package using AWS and LoRaWAN,” says Christian Schimik, chief executive officer at Stadtwerke Wolfsberg. “We installed one LoRaWAN device in the city and two smart water meters in the basement of a very old building, and it worked the first time, even through the thick stone walls.”

To collect and analyze the data from the smart meters, IoT Systems turned to its expertise of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It used AWS IoT Core to easily and securely connect devices to the cloud and AWS IoT Device Management to register, organize, monitor, and remotely manage IoT devices at scale. The collected data was stored in Amazon Timestream, a fast, scalable, and serverless time-series database. To visualize the data, a data lake was built using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance—and the team used AWS IoT Analytics, a fully managed, operationalized analytics solution for IoT devices.

Schimik says that although only about 40 percent of the population has had the smart meters fitted so far, the system has already proved its worth, with data showing exactly how much water is being used by individual households. “We used to send people to read the water meters once a year, but now the smart meters send us data every day,” says Schimik. “If there is a leak somewhere, we see it right away.”

In addition to accurately identifying leaks, the council no longer needs to hire staff to collect and verify meter readings. “Previously, several of our staff would be tied up for 3–4 months ensuring the correct meter readings were entered into the system,” says Schimik. “Now, using AWS, we automatically receive several readings per day from all the meters.”

Schimik explains that during the COVID-19 pandemic, households were asked to read the water meter themselves. However, the council also had to dedicate several full-time staff to make sure that the incoming readings were accurate. “Now everything is automated and digitized and we have water usage data any time we want,” says Schimik. “Today, reading the water meters is around 90 percent cheaper and the information is always reliable.”

The smart meters mean Stadtwerke Wolfsberg staff drive around 6,000 fewer kilometers every year, which reduces transport costs and saves 1,200kg of CO2 emissions.

Stadtwerke Wolfsberg is so happy with its new water management system, the council is already looking at expanding the system to monitor waste water. “We will soon be using the LoRaWAN technology to manage our sewage and waste water,” says Schimik. “We control a total of about 700 kilometers of water pipes and LoRaWAN is perfect because it can send data over long distances, so it has many different uses.”