We have a large 1800 apartment complex and we frequently face water shortage. Just to give you a perspective of the problem that I want to fix; there is one common sump which receives the municipality water, from here water is distributed to about 15 underground water storage tanks. Each of these underground storage tanks in turn supply water to 3-4 apartment building overhead tanks which in turn supply water to individual apartments. These are the problems we now face:
1. There are no individual meters or pipes for water supply, one pipe is supplying water to all apartments in a block. This is biggest source of the problem as sometime or other someone would leave a tap open and then water would keep draining.
2. Some apartment blocks consume disproportionate amount of water and some blocks do not get adequate amount of water.
3. There are no meters/flow meters to measure water supply into underground storage tanks or overhead tanks, making any measurement impossible. The water distribution is handled by a team of pump technicians but the system is at best, an ad-hoc system. There is no data based decision or ability to find root cause as and when get into problems.
My first response to the problem was to have some data, esp. inflow data for each underground tank and then each individual overhead tank so that we can have a view of the supply and consumption. However you can imagine, collecting this data manually, in case we install manual meters, would be quiet a task by itself and I would doubt the quality of data. Moreover in most cases it would be a reactive system since we would know of the problem in advance or early enough to solve. I was thinking of putting in electronic flowmeters in each of the underground storage tank supply and also each overhead tank to have accurate idea of supply to each cluster and also consumption patterns.
I would like to ideally have remote or if possible GSM transmitters on each of the flowmeters so that the data is real time. I would also like to have automatic water status on each cluster that indicates the water availability on each underground tank and associated overhead tanks.
Please let me know your suggestions as well any recommendations of any qualified vendor who can accomplish this for us.
Thanks.