This is a presentation made by Joanne Craven at the Waternomics final event on 31/01/2017 for sharing the project contribution in terms of leak detection software and hardware.
1. Shazam that water leak!
Sensors and faults
Contact: l.alfonso@unesco-ihe.org
Solomon Seyoum Ad Groenewegen
Leonardo Alfonso Joanne Craven
Schalk Jan van Andel Sandra de Vries
Nick van de Giesen
2. Some facts on household’s
leaks (US)
• Average household leak loss: 35,000 L/year
– More than 11 million households worth (over the whole USA)
• 10% of homes have leaks that waste more than
124,000 L/year (340L/day)
• Fixing easily corrected household water leaks can
save homeowners about 10% on their water bills
Source: EPA website
3. Objective
• To develop an automatic leak detection
method for households, including:
– a new, low cost, easy to install acoustic
sensor, capable to continuously record
pipe vibrations and send data to a server
– an acoustic detection software based on
audio fingerprinting, to analyse the data
sent to the server
6. ALD software
• Feed mode
– The ALD software creates fingerprints of
each sound recording and build database
• Detection mode
– Once the database is complete, ALD is like
Shazam: listen to new recordings, check if
they exist in database and retrieve message
10. Experiments
House 1 House 2
Number of 30 sec
files
3800+ files (every 5, 10 or 30
mins)
1700+ files (every 5 or 10
mins)
Appliances Toilet
Kitchen tap
Bath tap
Shower
Washing machine
Dishwasher
+
Toilet 2
Garden tap
N/A
Issues • Sensor regularly offline
• Loose cables, not detecting
• Solved: sensor always
online
• But: SD card fills fast
11. 0
10
20
30
40
50
60
23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 01 02 03 04
05 06
Number of analysed audio recordings
Day (above) and Month (below)
DETECTION - Found FEED - Found FEED - Not Found and Inserted
Feed vs detection House 1
15. Conclusions
• Automatic leak detection method for
households has been developed
• Results show sensor can “learn” how a
pipe normally sounds and detect
anomalies (potential leaks)
– Further testing required for sensor location
and false alarms
• Not conclusive if sensor can distinguish
water uses
17. Opportunities
• Market opportunities
– Categorisation of domestic water use
– Survelliance of water systems
• Aquaseca: 1-year old company doing
the same
19. @WATERNOMICS_EU www.waternomics.eu19
This project has received funding from the European Union’s
Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological
development and demonstration under grant agreement no
619660.
waternomics.eu @waternomics_eu
This project is member of and