Proceedings of the International Conference on Inventive Research in Computing Applications (ICIRCA 2018)

IEEE Xplore Compliant Part Number:CFP18N67-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-2456-2

Smart Water Monitoring System for Real-time

water quality and usage monitoring
1st Manish Kumar Jha 2nd Rajni Kumari Sah 3rd Rashmitha M. S.
BE, Dept. of ECE BE, Dept. of ECE BE, Dept. of ECE
Ramaiah Institute of Technology Ramaiah Institute of Technology Ramaiah Institute of Technology
Bengaluru, India Bengaluru, India Bengaluru, India
krmanish472@gmail.com sahrajni660@gmail.com msrashmitha@gmail.com

4th Rupam Sinha 5th Sujatha B. 6th Suma K. V.

BE, Dept. of ECE Associate Professor, Dept. of ECE Assistant Professor, Dept. of ECE
Ramaiah Institute of Technology Ramaiah Institute of Technology Ramaiah Institute of Technology
Bengaluru, India Bengaluru, India Bengaluru, India
rupamsinha2012@gmail.com sujatha@msrit.edu sumakv@msrit.edu

Abstract—This paper aims at designing a Smart Water Mon- of water quality analysis. Taufik Ibnu Salim et. al.[1] has
itoring System (SWMS) for real-time water quality and usage proposed a Portable and Online Water Quality Monitoring
monitoring. It consists of two parts: Smart Water Quantity meter System using Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The paper
and Smart Water Quality meter. The objective of designing Smart
Water Quantity Meter is to ensure water conservation by moni- presents a measurement device to verify and monitor the water
toring the amount of water consumed by a household, notifying quality in a large area using wireless sensor network, and
the same to the consumer and the authority. A three-slab billing mainly focuses on monitoring and collecting data from the
system generates consumption bill according to the quantity sensors node, storing the data into the PMS database, and
consumed. The Smart Water Quality meter checks the purity displaying real-time and historical data. Arjun K et. al.[2]
of portable water that the consumer receives, by measuring five
qualitative parameters of water viz. pH, temperature, turbidity, has come up with an idea for Detection of Water Level,
dissolved oxygen and conductivity. The system ensures to prevent Quality, and Leakage using Raspberry PiT M with the Internet
any health hazards or potential threats caused due to accidental of Things. Their proposed system relies on raspberry piT M
seepage of sewage or farm release into the portable water. An and sensors. The system measures the level, turbidity, pressure
online monitoring system is to provide these data on the cloud and pH and stores these measured values into the database, and
in real-time. Any violations in either the usage limit or water
quality is immediately notified to the consumer and authority based on the threshold values set, notifications are sent out to
via SMS and an alert signal generated by the system. consumers and authorities.

Keywords—SWMS, three-slab billing, quality, usage, real-time Shuang-Hua Yang et.al.[3] has successfully designed, in-
monitoring, physical parameters. stalled and tested IoT based remote, near real-time wireless
household water consumption monitoring system in several
I. I NTRODUCTION households in Poland and Greece. In their paper Sajith
Saseendran et. al.[4] have discussed about the design of an
Water is one of the most essential element for survival of
automated water usage monitoring system which proposes an
lives. About 70% of Earth’s surface is covered with water,
effective way of controlling the wastage of water at home or
yet the amount of freshwater fit for human consumption and
industries by means of Wireless Sensor nodes and LabVIEW
usage is as less as 2% of the total volume. With population
software. IoT is used to continuously monitor and track water
growth increasing at tremendous rate, the human community
usage via wireless sensor nodes and excess usage of water is
has begun to face the wrath of water scarcity, only to be
immediately indicated and alert is sent to the user.
elevated by uncontrolled urbanization and industrialization
which is further polluting the meager amount which is avail- In this paper, SWMS is designed with an objective to tackle
able for consumption. Presently, the quality and availability both these real-life problems which is gravely affecting the
of freshwater resource are the most pressing of the many quality of life that we live. Section II describes in detail
environmental challenges on the national horizon. our proposed system along with the flowchart and algorithm.
Keeping these factors in mind, water conservation holds The hardware and software implementation of the SWMS is
the topmost priority in today’s world. Also, monitoring the discussed in Section III. Section IV shows the various results
quality of water that is available to us for consumption is obtained on implementing the system, followed by Section V
equally important as pollution has left no space for pure and on Conclusions and Future Work that can be carried out on
potable water. Several works have been done in the field the designed system.

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Inventive Research in Computing Applications (ICIRCA 2018)
IEEE Xplore Compliant Part Number:CFP18N67-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-2456-2

II. PROPOSED SYSTEM water efficiently. Similarly, any deviation in the water quality
As mentioned in Section I, the Smart Water Monitoring is detected by the system, the consumer and the authority is
system proposed in this paper focuses on solving two of the notified via SMS and an email so that immediate action can
major problems related to water distribution in today’s world, be taken.
viz. Water Quality Checking and Water Usage Monitoring. The A. Flowchart
SWMS consists of two main parts: A smart water quantity
meter which ensures water conservation by monitoring the
amount of water consumed by a household, notifying the
same to the consumer and the authority. This will lead to
optimized amount of water consumed as the consumption
charge increases with the increase in water usage. A three-
slab billing system calculates the total bill for monthly water
consumption based on three water limits as shown in Table
II[6]. On crossing each of the three limits of water usage, the
consumer is intimated via SMS and email notifications along
with the detail of amount of water that has been consumed so
far.
The second part is a Smart water quality meter which checks
the purity of drinking water that the consumer receives. It
measures four qualitative parameters of water to determine
its potability. The parameters that are considered by this
system are pH, temperature, turbidity and conductivity. These
parameter values are compared against standard allowable
limits for drinking water as shown in Table I[5]. It prevents
any health hazards or potential threats caused due to accidental
seepage of sewage, farm release or any unwanted effluent into
the potable water supply lines.

TABLE I
WATER Q UALITY P HYSICAL PARAMETERS S TANDARD VALUE TABLE Fig. 1. Smart Water Monitoring System Flowchart

Water quality Standard Value

Parameter Range (unit) B. Algorithm
pH 6.5 - 8.5 The flowchart for the operation of SWMS is as shown in
Turbidity 6.0 - 10.0 (NTU)
Temperature 20 - 30 (0 C) Fig. 1. The algorithm of operation based on the same is as
Conductivity 0.00 - 0.05 (mS/m) follows:
• The three limits for water consumption are set by the
main station.
• Once a user opts for a new water supply connection, a
TABLE II
E XISTING TARIFF SYSTEM V / S PROPOSED VOLUME BASED SLAB SYSTEM unique user ID is provided and the system is set up at
the users household.
Slab Water Tariff Proposed Tariff • The water supply to the household starts.
(L) (Rs/KL) (Rs/KL) • At the entry point to the house, the quality of the water
0-8,000 (minimum) 7.00 7.00
8,001-25,000 11.00 26.00 is checked.
25,001-50,000 26.00 45.00 • The Water Quality sensor nodes collect the parameter
50,001-above 45.00 Termination of water supply values and serially send it to the Raspberry PiT M .
for that particular month
• Based on the standard quality parameters, the Raspberry
PiT M decides whether the water is portable and fit for
An online monitoring system is used to provide remote drinking or not.
access to the data generated by the monitoring system. The • If the water is fit for drinking, the water supply to the
data, i.e. the water quality parameter values and the water house continues.
consumed by the consumer for a given period of time, is • Based on the three slab system, the water consumption
updated periodically on the web portal which can be accessed is checked. After each limit is crossed, a notification is
by the consumer and the concerned authority at any instance sent to the user as well as the authority mentioning the
of time. Once the water level crosses any of the three slabs, amount of water consumed from the start of the month
the consumer is notified who can then take measures to utilize till that point of time.

978-1-5386-2456-2/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 618

 Proceedings of the International Conference on Inventive Research in Computing Applications (ICIRCA 2018)
IEEE Xplore Compliant Part Number:CFP18N67-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-2456-2

• The water flow continues until another limit is crossed. 2) Arduino UNOT M : The sensors used for collecting
For each of the three limits, the cycle repeats. water quality data are interfaced with Arduino UNOT M ,
• At the end of the month, based on the proposed three-slab which in turn is serially connected to RPi. The data obtained
system, the total bill is generated. from these sensors are in Analog form. Thus these sensors
• After generation of the bill, the readings are reset and require the use of Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) for
water supply for next month begins. direct interfacing with RPi. As an alternative to ADC, we
• In case the water is not fit for drinking, a notification have used Arduino UNOT M to simply the task, and leaving
is sent to the user and authority along with the physical scope for further feature upscaling.
parameter values of the water.
• The water supply is immediately stopped to prevent 3) Sensors: Four sensors are employed in the implementa-
any accidental consumption of impure water, and the tion of SWMS. The pH sensor, Turbidity sensor and Tempera-
supply remains closed until the water quality issue is ture sensor[8-9] are used for collecting water quality data. The
resolved[10]. pH sensor gives the information of pH level of water sample,
turbidity sensor measures the quantity of suspended particles
III. IMPLEMENTATION and as the name suggest, temperature sensor measures the tem-
perature of the water. Since the Electrical Conductivity(EC)
The block diagram of the SWMS is as shown in Fig. of water is closely related to the temperature of water, at near
2. The direction of arrow denotes the direction of flow of room temperature, the temperature sensor data is also used to
data. Broadly, the system consists of a microprocessor which measure conductivity of water.
processes all the input data and based on them it takes
decisions. Raspberry PiT M (RPi) acts as the microprocessor EC = 0.05 ∗ [1 + 0.0191 ∗ (T − 25)] (1)
and the various sensors - pH sensor, Temperature sensor,
Turbidity sensor and water flow sensor act as input sources to where T = Temperature in o C
the RPi. Based on the input data from these sensors, the RPi Water flow sensor is used to measure the amount of water
sends actuating signals to the Solenoid valve and LCD Display. consumed. It consists of a plastic valve body, a water rotor,
The Solenoid valve acts as water flow control mechanism. It and a hall-effect sensor. When water flows through the rotor,
allows the flow of water when open, and terminates the supply rotor rolls. Its speed changes with different rate of flow. The
when closed. LCD Display is used to display appropriate hall-effect sensor outputs the corresponding pulse signal. As
messages at different instances. water flows through the sensor, the rotor rolls. The number of
rotations of the rotor gives us the measure of amount of water
that has flown through the flow sensor.

Fig. 2. Smart Water Monitoring System Block diagram

A. Hardware Fig. 3. SWMS Hardware Implementation

1) Raspberry PiT M : The Raspberry PiT M (RPi) is a low
cost single board computer with USB ports, Ethernet port,
GPIO port, Micro SD card slot, audio port, HDMI port and B. Software
Power provision. It is the most important component in the A web portal is designed for real-time remote monitoring
system. It takes sensor data as input and gives output to the of the SWMS system. The water quality data is periodically
valve and LCD. The water quality is determination and water updated on the portal, with graphical representations demon-
consumption calculations are carried out by RPi, based on stration the safety level of water based on individual physical
the standard quality value table and proposed slab tariff table parameter of water.
as mentioned in Section III. The water utilization data is also updated periodically. A
graphical representation showing the consumption in last 12

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Inventive Research in Computing Applications (ICIRCA 2018)
IEEE Xplore Compliant Part Number:CFP18N67-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-2456-2

hours (can be changed according to our need) is helpful in limit. Hence water supply will be terminated. Similarly, water
giving an overview of the total water utilization throughout the in Sample 3 has a temperature and conductivity beyond the
day. It also shows the total water utilization since the starting standard range.
of the month, and the corresponding bill calculated based on
the proposed three slabs.
IV. RESULT
The SWMS is successfully implemented as shown in Fig. 3.
The output of the system against a Pure water sample is shown
in Fig. 4. The physical parameter values for the water sample
and the result, i.e. whether water is Pure or Impure based on
these four parameters, are displayed on Terminal. When the
water passes the quality test, supply continues and the three
usage limits are displayed followed by the water consumption
reading.

Fig. 6. SWMS Billing window showing hourly water usage

Fig.6 shows the plot of water consumption in the past

hours of the day. Consumption above an average threshold
value is highlighted in orange-¿red for visual interpretation
purposes. The cumulative water usage since the beginning of
the month along with the tentative bill, calculated according
to the proposed slab, is updated in real-time for the customers.
V. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS
The Smart water quality check meter is automatic and does
Fig. 4. SWMS output sample not require much human interference, thereby reducing the
errors. The real-time monitoring provides immediate remote
access to the water quality as well as quantity data for any
household. All these measures aims at bringing down the
unnecessary usage of water and prevention of health hazards
caused due to consumption of impure water.
The usage of individual sensors for each parameter adds to
the cost of the system. Using a single sensor for analyzing
multiple parameters can help reduce the cost. Further work on
developing an integrated sensor system which can monitor all
the physical parameters of water to analyze its quality at least
cost can be carried out. Latest advancements in computation,
such as Machine Learning and/or AI algorithms can be applied
to make a decision about Water quality These techniques can
Fig. 5. SWMS Quality Check window showing water with desired Quality also be used to predict the water usage for individual users,
based on their previous data.
Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 show the web portal where the real-time
R EFERENCES
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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Inventive Research in Computing Applications (ICIRCA 2018)
IEEE Xplore Compliant Part Number:CFP18N67-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-2456-2

[5] http://www.groundwatertnpwd.org.in/wqlab2.htm
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