Water metering

Water is one of our most critical resources, and managing its distribution and consumption is key for sustainable urban development, utility cost control, and infrastructure maintenance. For this purpose, the ThingsBoard platform is an ideal choice, offering powerful capabilities for real-time monitoring, alarms, visualization, and analytics.

View live demo

Traditional water metering methods often fall short in providing real-time data, accurate billing, and predictive maintenance insights. By leveraging connected sensors and intelligent dashboards, organizations can unlock powerful insights into water usage, detect anomalies like leaks, and automate alarm systems. At the core of these solutions is ThingsBoard, a flexible IoT platform enabling the collection, processing, and visualization of telemetry data from water meters in real time.

This ThingsBoard-powered water metering solution provides complete real-time visibility into water usage, instant response to anomalies, and valuable analytics for long-term infrastructure planning. Scalable across municipalities, residential complexes, and commercial facilities, it offers a powerful tool for smart and efficient water resource management.

Solution structure of water metering use case

ThingsBoard seamlessly integrates with IoT-enabled water meters that collect real-time data on consumption, temperature, and battery level, sending it over wireless networks such as LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, and LTE for processing.

The platform stores this data, applies intelligent rules to trigger alerts, and visualizes everything through intuitive dashboards for immediate operational insights.

Dashboard structure of water metering solution

The ThingsBoard water metering dashboard is structured into dedicated states, each focusing on a key aspect of system monitoring, control, and analysis. Below is a breakdown of each state with its purpose and content:

Total overview state

This view provides a real-time snapshot of system-wide metrics, such as total water consumed in the current week, active/inactive device counts, and any low battery alerts. An interactive map shows meter locations, while bar charts and alarm lists offer instant visibility into daily usage and critical threshold breaches.

Analytics state

Designed for trend analysis, this state allows users to compare historical and current water consumption patterns over the week. It helps identify usage spikes or efficiency improvements by showing data from both the present and the previous intervals.

Devices state

This dashboard displays all registered water meters with essential metadata like latest readings, status, and leak detection. Users can manage device information, monitor their real-time performance, and quickly respond to technical issues. Additionally, this view allows users to add new devices by entering their serial number and metadata, edit existing device details, change geolocation parameters by dragging a map marker, and configure alarm thresholds for consumption, battery, or inactivity detection.

Customers state

Each water meter is associated with a specific customer profile, allowing for individualized usage tracking and customer service. The dashboard enables administrators to add or update customer contact details and manage meter assignments.

Alarms state

This critical interface aggregates all triggered alarms with timestamps, originators, and severity levels. Operators can quickly acknowledge or dismiss alerts, ensuring rapid incident response and system reliability.

Settings state

Here, administrators configure alarm thresholds (e.g., daily/weekly consumption, battery level) and notification preferences. The system supports both email and SMS alerts to ensure stakeholders are promptly informed.

Individual device dashboards

Each device has its own dedicated view showing granular consumption data by hour, daily/weekly totals, and battery health. It includes editable location mapping and detailed metadata, enabling localized control and diagnostics. Additionally, each dashboard displays device-specific contact information for the owner, facilitating support and communication, as well as a photo section that allows users to upload or update an image of the physical device for visual identification and verification.

Customer-specific dashboards

ThingsBoard provides individual dashboards tailored for end customers, allowing them to monitor only their assigned water meters. This ensures data privacy while empowering users with full visibility into their personal consumption, device status, and alert history.

Rule chains: data processing logic

The backend logic of the solution is driven by ThingsBoard rule chains, which handle incoming telemetry from devices and automate alarm routing, threshold checks, and notification dispatch. These visual flowcharts allow platform administrators to customize workflows based on device status, tenant or customer settings, and alarm types, ensuring flexibility and scalability of the solution.

Applications of water metering: versatility across industries

IoT-based water metering is not limited to utility companies. The same architecture and approach can be repurposed across a wide range of sectors:

Municipal water services

By using IoT-based water metering, municipalities can automate meter readings and billing processes, gain insight into consumption trends across entire cities, and react instantly to issues such as leaks or overuse.

Smart buildings

Water metering in smart buildings enables facility managers to fine-tune plumbing infrastructure, minimize waste through real-time monitoring, and improve the overall experience and sustainability for occupants.

Agriculture & irrigation

Farmers can leverage real-time data to optimize irrigation schedules, reduce unnecessary water usage, and improve crop yields while maintaining environmental responsibility.

Industrial facilities

Industries benefit from accurate water monitoring to stay compliant with strict environmental standards and to manage utility costs more effectively through predictive consumption insights.

Hospitality & resorts

Hotels and resorts can monitor water usage across various zones or guest areas to implement sustainable practices, reduce operating costs, and engage guests in eco-conscious initiatives.

Municipal water services

Industrial facilities

Industries benefit from accurate water monitoring to stay compliant with strict environmental standards and to manage utility costs more effectively through predictive consumption insights.

Smart buildings

Hospitality & resorts

Hotels and resorts can monitor water usage across various zones or guest areas to implement sustainable practices, reduce operating costs, and engage guests in eco-conscious initiatives.

Agriculture & irrigation

Farmers can leverage real-time data to optimize irrigation schedules, reduce unnecessary water usage, and improve crop yields while maintaining environmental responsibility.

Summary of water metering solution

With a low-code approach, intuitive dashboards, and comprehensive alerting mechanisms, ThingsBoard serves as a cornerstone for digital transformation in water resource management. Whether you're scaling for a city or optimizing a single facility, this solution adapts to your needs— one drop at a time.

ThingsBoard advantages

Security

ThingsBoard protects your data with industry-standard encryption algorithms like RSA and ECDSA. Secure communication is ensured via TLS (TCP) and DTLS (UDP). Role-based access control and audit logs further enhance platform security.

Data visualization

Visualize data with interactive, multi-state dashboards—no coding needed. Use built-in charts, gauges, maps, tables, and control widgets. Customize every detail via advanced settings or custom widget bundles. Real-time, low-latency updates supported via embedded web-sockets.

Connectivity

Connect devices directly to the platform via the following built-in protocols: HTTP, CoAP, MQTT, LwM2M, and SNMP. Connect devices in your local network to the cloud using ThingsBoard Gateway via Modbus, BLE, BACnet, OPC-UA, and other protocols.

Data processing

ThingsBoard allows you to define app logic using a drag-and-drop rule chain designer. Its scalable Rule Engine uses message queues like Kafka or AWS SQS for durable, reliable data processing. You can handle data within the engine or forward it to external systems.

Scalability and high availability

ThingsBoard supports high-availability cloud and on-prem deployments via Kubernetes or bare-metal. Its components scale horizontally and handle 18K+ vehicles and 5K+ devices in prod.

Multi-tenancy

ThingsBoard provides UI and API to manage tenants, customers, users, devices, and assets. Single tenant may have multiple tenant administrators and millions of devices and customers. It also offers out-of-the-box support of OTA updates for your smart meters.

LoRaWAN & SigFox support

Connect LoRaWAN devices via integrations with standard network servers like TTN, LORIOT, ChirpStack, Actility, etc. Connect SigFox devices via integrations with the SigFox backend.

Mobile application

Build your own IoT mobile application with minimum coding efforts using ThingsBoard Mobile Application, an open-source project based on Flutter. Leverage a built-in set of mobile actions to take a photo, scan QR code, update location, and more directly within the dashboard.