Sensitivity of water meters to small leakage

Water leakage beyond the meter at the household level is becoming an emerging problem in a world where water must be respected and saved. More than public awareness campaigns for citizens, automatic leakage detection could give in the future the best results. Domestic water consumption will be continuously monitored by smart meters able to distinguish between normal absorption and leakage. Nowadays, some research prototypes of smart water meters were designed for continuous monitoring aimed to collect measurements and send them to a central unit for developing statistics on consumptions and alarms. In this paper, the authors propose a battery-powered visual smart device that could be a good starting point to generate leakage alarms at the household level. After a brief description of state of the art, the paper at first faces the problem of the leakage detection dependence on meter sensitivity. Then, an image-based technique for automatic “null consumption detection” to be applied both to the register last digit and to a needle of water meters is tested on three different water meters. Finally, experimental results confirm that this image-based technique, allowing the automatic detection of Periods With Null Consumption, can be very useful for water leakage detection algorithms.