Sofiyska Voda is the leading water utility in Bulgaria that provides water and wastewater services to the capital of the country. They are one of the first ThingsLog clients. In this use case study, we are presenting the general usage of ThingsLog products by Sofiyska Voda.
Introduction
Sofiyska Voda’s mission is to be a top-class supplier of high-quality water supply and sewerage services. They provide water for more than 1,5 million people living in Sofia. Correspondingly, their activities include the operation, maintenance, and management of water mains and sewers.
Overview
Since Sofia is the most populated city in Bulgaria, it requires significant amounts of water for consumers. Currently, there are three sources of water:
Beli Iskar dam
Volume: 15 080 000 m3. It amounts to 20% of the water consumption of Sofia. This is one of the highest mountain dams in Europe.
Iska dam
Volume: 673 000 000 m3. It accounts for 80% of the water consumption of the city.
Water catchments and reservoirs
They make up less than 1% of the water consumption of the city. Sofiyska Voda retrieves water from the mountains of Vitosha, Liulin, Plana, and Stara Planina.
Solution
Thingslog Smart water metering solution aids Soviyska Voda in consumption profiling of key business customers. The solution is responsible for metering, leak detection, and general monitoring of some of the key customers of the utility. Remote water meter reading in Sofiyska Voda has been based on ThingsLog low power data loggers with 2G, NB-IoT, and LoRa/LoraWAN. The idea of the operator was to be created consumption profiles of some of the key target groups of water consumers in the city and the information to be used for further analysis and profiling.
Sofiyska Voda was very satisfied by the fact that no matter the network technology being used they always got good data for their purposes. In the end, it was not easy to get good network coverage especially with LoRa and NB-IoT across the whole city so ThingsLog network diversity in data loggers portfolio was always handy.
Result
At the present time, Sofiyska Voda is satisfied with ThingsLog products that allow customization & flexibility within their networks. Pavel Mihaylov, the senior manager at Sofiyska Voda, shared that ThingsLog products implementation has been requested partially by him.
Example deployment on a combined water meter is presented below.
In particular, Pavel was very happy with the ability of loggers to be remotely configurable over the air. He was also very happy with the custom water meter flow rate repots.
Based on the flow statistics reports Sofiyska Voda is able to determine is a certain water meter-sized correctly for the particular location or is too small (most of the water pass < Q1) or too large (most of the water flows over Q3 of the meter) for the purpose.
Consequently, the smart water metering solution is satisfying the needs of the company in terms of water consumption monitoring and profiling. It has outperformed other solutions produced by bigger vendors and larger local market players.
References
Sofiyska Voda AD, www.sofiyskavoda.bg/en/default.aspx.
“Remote Water Meter Monitoring.” ThingsLog, https://thingslog-stage.lkjh.me/remote-water-meter-monitoring/.
