Water network telemetry

You cannot fix the leak you cannot find.

Nabaflow retrofits pressure and flow sensors onto the meters and junctions a utility already owns. Continuous telemetry replaces quarterly reading rounds, and anomaly models narrow a suspected loss to a pipe segment — before it reaches the surface.

Request a pilot Download the network loss brief

Retrofit hardware · NB-IoT / LoRaWAN backhaul · Built for existing infrastructure

District network view Sample data
Network topology map of a water district A schematic map of four district metered areas. A reservoir feeds a trunk main that branches through valve nodes, pressure sensors and district meters to an elevated tank. One segment in DMA-03, labelled SEG-14, is flagged with an amber warning marker reading “leak suspected”. R-01 · RESERVOIR T-02 · TANK DMA-01 OLD CITY DMA-02 INDUSTRIAL DMA-03 HILLSIDE DMA-04 EAST BANK SEG-14 · LEAK SUSPECTED Night flow above learned band, 6 nights CONFIDENCE: MEDIUM · UNVERIFIED
  • Pressure sensor
  • Valve node
  • District meter
  • Trunk main
  • Distribution main
  • Flagged segment
  • Telemetry Pressure + flow, 1–15 min interval
  • Fitting Retrofit onto existing meters
  • Backhaul NB-IoT · LoRaWAN · GSM fallback
  • Power Battery, multi-year design life

The problem

Water is lost long before anyone notices it is gone.

Non-revenue water is the share of treated, pumped, paid-for water that never reaches a paying customer. Most utilities know the figure is high. Very few can say which street it is on. The instrumentation that would answer that question was never installed, and replacing every meter to get it is not a budget any council will approve.

  1. 01

    Billing runs on data that is already months old

    Manual quarterly reading rounds produce one number per customer per season. By the time a strange consumption pattern appears on an invoice, the cause has been running for weeks and the dispute is unwinnable.

  2. 02

    Leaks are reported by the public, not by the network

    A background leak can run for a year underground. It becomes visible when it undermines a road or surfaces in a basement — at which point the repair is an emergency, at emergency cost.

  3. 03

    Locating a loss means excavating blind

    Without segment-level flow and pressure, crews work from complaint maps and guesswork. Every dry hole is money spent, road reinstated, and public patience consumed for nothing.

  4. 04

    Unmetered and illegal connections stay invisible

    Water drawn upstream of a meter never appears in any ledger. The only trace is a pressure and flow signature that nobody is currently recording.

The platform

Instrument the network you already own.

Clamp-on and inline sensors fit the mechanical meters and junctions already in the ground. They stream pressure and flow continuously. Nabaflow learns each district's normal demand profile, then reports where live behaviour departs from it — with the segment, the evidence, and a confidence level attached.

DMA-03 · flow profile, 24 h Sample data · not a customer record
Twenty-four hour flow profile showing a night-flow anomaly A time-series chart of flow in cubic metres per hour across one day. The measured line tracks the expected demand curve but sits roughly fourteen cubic metres per hour above it at all times. The gap is most visible between midnight and six in the morning, when genuine demand falls close to zero but measured flow does not. The night window is shaded amber and labelled as an anomaly. 0 20 40 60 80 m³/h 00:00 04:00 08:00 12:00 16:00 20:00 24:00 LOCAL TIME · 24 H Δ 14 m³/h SUSTAINED MINIMUM NIGHT FLOW · 00:00–06:00
  • Measured flow
  • Expected demand
  • Unexplained volume

Real demand falls near zero overnight. Loss does not. That difference is the signal.

Alert feed Illustrative
  • Critical

    Sustained night flow above learned band

    Minimum night flow in DMA-03 has exceeded the expected band for six consecutive nights. Loss localised to segment SEG-14 between valve V-204 and district meter DM-07.

    DMA-03 · SEG-1402:40Confidence: medium

  • Warning

    Pressure transient repeating on a fixed schedule

    Sharp nightly pressure drop downstream of V-118 with no matching metered demand. Consistent with an unmetered draw-off; requires a field check before any conclusion.

    DMA-02 · V-11804:12Recurring: 9 nights

  • Warning

    Zone inflow and sub-meter total diverging

    DMA-01 inflow exceeds the sum of downstream customer meters by a widening margin over 14 days. Either a meter is under-registering or water is leaving the zone unbilled.

    DMA-01Daily rollupTrend: widening

  • Info

    Sensor battery below service threshold

    Node PS-2214 reporting 18 % remaining. Scheduled for the next maintenance round; telemetry unaffected.

    DMA-04 · PS-2214Yesterday

  • Resolved

    Billing export completed

    Monthly meter read batch closed and exported to the billing system. Any node that failed validation is listed rather than estimated.

    All zones01 of month

Sensor health Illustrative
Node Type Zone Last seen Battery Status
PS-1041PressureDMA-014 min 86 % OK
FM-0326FlowDMA-022 min 71 % OK
DM-0072Zone meterDMA-036 min 64 % Flagged
PS-2214PressureDMA-049 min 18 % Service
FM-0411FlowDMA-043 min 93 % OK

A node that stops reporting is an alert, not a silent gap in the record.

District metered areas Illustrative

DMA-01 Old City

Nodes184

Night flow7.2 m³/h

BandWithin

DMA-02 Industrial

Nodes96

Night flow18.4 m³/h

BandWatch

DMA-03 Hillside

Nodes212

Night flow19.0 m³/h

BandAbove

DMA-04 East Bank

Nodes140

Night flow5.8 m³/h

BandWithin

Figures shown are a worked example, not results from a live network.

Capabilities

What the system measures, and what it tells you.

Seven capabilities, all of them running on the same retrofit sensor layer and the same continuous data stream.

Retrofit sensors

Clamp-on and inline units fit the mechanical meters and junctions already in the ground. No wholesale meter replacement programme, no waiting for a capital cycle.

Continuous pressure and flow

Every node reports on an interval you set, between one and fifteen minutes. Pressure and flow together, because either one alone is ambiguous.

Leak localisation to a segment

Anomaly models compare live behaviour against the learned profile of each zone and narrow a suspected loss to the pipe run between two known nodes — with the evidence attached.

Unmetered draw detection

Pressure drops that repeat on a schedule and do not match any metered demand are surfaced as candidates for a field check. Nabaflow reports the signature; the utility decides what it means.

Billing-grade automated reads

Scheduled reads replace the manual round and export straight to the billing system. Failed validations are listed as failures rather than quietly estimated.

Per-unit building dashboards

Campuses, towers and mixed-use blocks get consumption per unit, per riser and per tenant, plus burst alerts that reach a facilities phone at 03:00 rather than a caretaker at 08:00.

Non-revenue water reporting

A standing water balance per zone: input volume, billed consumption, and the unexplained remainder — tracked against your own pre-deployment baseline, month over month.

How it works

From survey to a shortlist a crew can act on.

A pilot normally runs on one or two district metered areas first, so the utility can judge the output before committing the rest of the network.

Survey and retrofit

We map the district with your existing asset records, pick sensor positions at zone inlets, key valves and customer meters, and fit the hardware. Most fittings do not require a main shutdown.

Typically 1–2 weeks

Establish the baseline

Two to four weeks of continuous telemetry establish what normal looks like for each zone — weekday, weekend, seasonal and night-time. Alerting stays quiet until that profile is stable.

2–4 weeks

Monitor and flag

Live flow and pressure are compared against the learned band. Departures are raised with a severity, a zone, a segment and a confidence level — never as a bare red dot.

Continuous

Verify and repair

Crews work a ranked shortlist instead of a complaint map. What they find in the ground is logged back against the alert, which is how the model gets better on your network.

Ongoing loop

Pricing

Priced per node, so a pilot can start small.

Hardware is bought outright or leased. Monitoring is charged per active node. The analytics tier is what utilities add when they need a defensible water balance rather than an alert feed.

Hardware

Sensor node

$120 per node, outright

Or $6 per node per month on a lease, which folds the hardware into opex and includes replacement.

  • Pressure or flow unit, retrofit mount
  • Battery powered, multi-year design life
  • NB-IoT, LoRaWAN or GSM backhaul
Ask about hardware

Most pilots start here

Monitoring

$4 per node, per month

Continuous telemetry, the alert feed, zone dashboards and sensor health for every active node.

  • 1–15 minute telemetry interval
  • Leak, burst and anomaly alerting with severity
  • Automated meter reads and billing export
  • Per-unit dashboards for building operators
Request a pilot

Utilities

Network analytics

$500 per month, from

For water departments and authorities running a loss-reduction programme across multiple districts.

  • Non-revenue water balance per district
  • Segment-level localisation and ranked worklists
  • Repair outcome logging and model retraining
  • Data export and API access
Talk to us

Indicative list pricing. Volume, lease terms and installation are quoted per network — tell us the node count and we will put a real number against it.

Evidence

The numbers we will publish are the ones we have measured.

Nabaflow is opening its first pilot programme. We are building partnerships with municipal and village council water departments, building operators, and university water and environmental engineering groups. Until those pilots produce results, these figures stay empty — and when they fill, they will be measured against each network's own pre-deployment baseline.

Not yet published Cubic metres of loss prevented Reported per pilot once a baseline water balance has been established and repairs verified.
Not yet published Municipalities piloting Named only with each authority's written consent. No logo goes on this page before that.
Not yet published Reduction in non-revenue water Measured against your own pre-deployment figure, not an industry average borrowed from somebody else's network.

What Nabaflow does

  • Monitors pressure and flow continuously and keeps the record auditable.
  • Flags behaviour that departs from a learned baseline, with a severity and a confidence level.
  • Narrows a suspected loss to a segment so a crew has somewhere to start.
  • Produces meter reads and a water balance you can defend to an auditor.

What it does not do

  • It does not guarantee that every leak will be detected. Some losses are too small or too diffuse to separate from demand.
  • It does not assess water quality or potability, and it is not a substitute for regulatory sampling and testing.
  • It does not confirm theft. An unexplained pressure signature is a reason to send someone to look, nothing more.
  • It does not deliver regulatory compliance on its own. Compliance is the utility's, and we supply evidence toward it.

On the figures shown across this site

Every chart, alert, table and district figure on this page is a worked example built to show the shape of the output. None of it is drawn from a live customer network, and no utility, council or building operator named anywhere here is a current Nabaflow customer. Water infrastructure decisions are public-safety decisions; we would rather show you an empty field than a borrowed one.

Start with one district.

Tell us the size of your network and how it is metered today. We will come back with a pilot scope, a node count and a real price — not a brochure.

Request a pilot Get the network loss brief