Water Monitoring System: A Product Which Helps The Indian Urban Household Water Charging System

Abstract:

The goal of this project is to implement a product to help the Indian urban household water charging system. The project includes a water flow rate sensor to provide an unconcerned solution to calculate and track water consumption in cities with mobile communications and mobile phones. Arduino, an ATMEGA328 prototyping microcontroller, creates and sends out SMS at the end of each month. Alternatively, a thing speak web platform can be used to get accurate water use with maps and maps and a web application called the Push box sends a notification to the smartphone user. A mobile device is also designed to provide access to the cloud as a user interface.

Introduction

Through building consists of a single analog water meter in the current water billing system and, regardless of the amount of water used, the overall bill is always divided into the entire property. Our system can be set up cost-efficiently in each room. And many devices used in the process include both the analog (mechanical) and the digital meters, but the two meters do not make it easy to read the values and to communicate them to the user in a timely manner, allowing the user to track the use every day and thus helps in future water use planning and thus in water conservation efforts.

At the moment, the user will wait until the end of the month to know how much his water is being used and the water bill is used in detail, the user can hardly access regular data. Then after that it is time to provide the bill for water because people come from water then send the bill. The bill is not appropriate. With the timely notification of username and SMS on the mobile phone, water use can be tracked on a regular basis via the free cloud platform and the total amount of water, our project aims to address all these issues.

The goal cost about 2000 INR seems to be costly relative to commonly used mechanical water meters, but as this is a expense for once, it will probably save customers money because only what they are using will be accounted for. Mechanical water meters are ideal for corrosion because they are made of metal. with meters exposed to outside world. The machine can be made less susceptible to environmental changes with more circuitry and less mechanical components as it has a wide range of working conditions. It is sent via SMS when consumed at the end of the month. An Android application is also designed to serve as a user interface to these functions.

Literature Survey

According to the work of Ria Sood, Manjit Kaur, Hemant Lenka, they contributed to DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOMATIC WATER Flow meter. Paper aimed at developing a low cost flow meter model for calculating the flow rate through the irrigation pipeline.

KULKARNI AND TIM FARNHAM focused at identifying the significant problems associated with water treatment plants, such as leakage management, demand management, asset management and so on.

This model has developed and implemented a network of wireless sensors for power, water and other devices. We have introduced a meter reading program based on IOT technology due to the difficulty of conventional metering such as error reading, inaccuracy, external factors affecting measuring. This program carries out tasks including calculation interpretation, bill delivery and notification.

Existing System:

In the existing water billing system, each building consists of one analog water meter and the total bill amount is evenly distributed to each home in that building, regardless of the amount of water that the home consumes, our system is cost-effective enough to be installed in every household, on the floor. Also, many of the water systems used in the process are analog (mechanical) and digital meters, yet do not allow the facility to read the values and communicate them to the user in good time, allowing the user to track the use on a daily basis and therefore assisting with future water use planning and thus helping with water conservation measures.

Proposed System:

The mechanism for the conservation of the flow is the calculation of the inflow and outflow of the stream. Water supplied by the Water Distribution Authority is stored in ground floor reservoirs or overhead tanks and is then distributed to the rest of the customers. This project installs flow measurement sensors at the input and then tests the amount of water in the water reservoirs. The amount of water within the reservoir will provide an cumulative difference between the inflow and the outflow of water. Therefore, the outflow can be estimated.

System Design:

The system requires the use of a wide variety of creative technologies. First, the use of high density polyethylene pipes requiring fewer joints makes the device more durable and eliminates the loss of water by leakage.

Second, the use of the Automatic Meter Reading system has contributed to the possibility of successful auditing of water at any time and with a 100% accuracy.

This IoT-based automated water billing system consists of a digital water flow rate sensor that is used to measure the volume of water consumed more accurately than the traditional analog meters. Based on the amount of water consumed, the bill is produced at the end of the month and a notification is sent to the registered user. Around the same time, the specifics of this bill are posted on the LCD panel, eliminating delays in the process. An Application is made available to customers where they can track the amount of water they have used on a regular basis and even access the electronic bill payment system.

Node MCU with an on-board ESP8266 Microcontroller is used in this project. The device has ports for input / output. 5V, USB power supply. The Water Flow Rate Sensor used here is based on the Hall Effect Working Principle.

Block diagram:

Working principle:

The block diagram of our project is as shown in the above figure. Here we used Node MCU based on ESP8266 microcontroller because it consists of inbuilt Wi-Fi module and the water flow rate sensors one is at the distributer side and another two at the customer side. The data is continuously uploading to the Blynk server and the customer can fetch the details from the Blynk android application and also a 16 X 2 LCD is used to display the amount of water consumed.

Methodlogy:

In this proposed method, we are not only calculating water usage and generating bills on that basis, but we are also monitoring for water leakage or waste and informing the authorities about this.

First we attach a single water flow sensor at the outlet of the main water tank or reservoir, then one at each house inlet. The water usage of each house can be seen in the lcd monitor And these values are constantly updated to the blynk server with the support of the ESP8266 wifi module, which has a constant power supply. And these values can also be seen in the blynk application.

With the support of the code we use, we compare the flow of water from the main tank outlet and the accumulation of each individual house inlet, if there is any variation in these values, this means that there is some leakage or wastage of water in the pipes. As there would be a small excess of water in the pipes (water that is always present in the pipes), we are eliminating that amount of water from the difference values collected.

Water bills are issued at the end of each month and the bill amount is sent to the owner via e-mail, mobile notification, and the owner can pay the bill amount online or offline. The bill balance is also always available in the blynk app.

Hardware requirements:

1. Node MCD

The Node MCU- ESP8266 is a microcontroller with wifi capability. It is an open source Io T platform. This small board allows microcontrollers to connect to a Wi-Fi network and make simple TCP/IP connections using Hayes-style commands. Node MCU refers default to the firmware. Lua is a scripting language used by this firmware. The operating system and processor used in it is XTOS and ESP8266. It has a memory of 128KB and storage of 4MB. The power for the controller is provided through USB.

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2. Liquid Crystal Display LCD

Liquid crystalDisplay LCD is a combination of two states of matter, the solid and the liquid. It is an electronic display module with a 16×2 LCD screen which says that it has 16 characters with respect to 2 rows. LCD uses a crystal liquid to produce a visible image. This technology used for displaying the image in the notebook or some other electronic devices. It works on the principle of blocking light rather than an emitting light and consists of 16 pins from that 8 pins are input and also it contains the external input voltage pin of 5v. It has a unique advantage of having low power consumption than the LED or cathode ray tube.

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3. Water Flow rate sensor:

Water flow sensors are used for this purpose. Water flow sensors are installed at the water source or pipes to measure the rate of flow of water and calculate the amount of water flowed through the pipe. Rate of flow of water is measured as liters per hour or cubic meters.

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4. Power supply

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5. Jumper wires

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Software Requirements:

1. Arduino IDE

The Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a cross-platform application (for Windows, macOS, Linux) that is written in functions from C and C++. It is used to write and upload programs to Arduino compatible boards, but also, with the help of 3rd party cores, other vendor development boards.

2. Embedded C

Embedded C is a generic term given to a programming language written in C, which is associated with a particular hardware architecture. Embedded C is an extension to the C language with some additional header files. These header files may change from controller to controller.

3. Blynk Application For Android

Blynk was designed for the Internet of Things. It can control hardware remotely, it can display sensor data, it can store data, vizualize it and do many other cool things.

There are three major components in the platform:

• Blynk App – allows to you create amazing interfaces for your projects using various widgets we provide.
• Blynk Server – responsible for all the communications between the smartphone and hardware. You can use our Blynk Cloud or run your private Blynk server locally. It’s open-source, could easily handle thousands of devices and can even be launched on a Raspberry Pi.
• Blynk Libraries – for all the popular hardware platforms – enable communication with the server and process all the incoming and outcoming commands.
• Features:
  • a. Similar API & UI for all supported hardware & devices
  • b. Connection to the cloud using:
    • i. WiFi
    • ii. Bluetooth and BLE
    • iii. Ethernet
    • iv. USB (Serial)
    • v. GSM
  • c. Set of easy-to-use Widgets
  • d. Direct pin manipulation with no code writing
  • e. Easy to integrate and add new functionality using virtual pins
  • f. History data monitoring via SuperChart widget
  • g. Device-to-Device communication using Bridge Widget
  • h. Sending emails, tweets, push notifications, etc.

Conclusion And Future Enhancement:

As mentioned in this article, an automated water billing system based on IoT plays an increasingly important role in the conservation of water. The implementation of water conservation approaches and technologies that promote the conservation and management of water is therefore a field of increased importance. By investing in these technology and systems now, cities will dramatically reduce consumption and ease the burden on our nation’s water supply. The project explains the design and function of the Smart Energy Meter and how the Smart Energy Meter can be used for Automatic Meter Reading. In this age of technology, human growth is the most economical implementation.

In this proposal, we are just informing the authorities about the leakage of water in the pipes. In the further improvements, we can use a valve near the tank outlet to stop the flow of water in the pipes if water leakage is detected, so that we can minimize the loss of water until the authorities come to repair the damaged pipe line.

References:

1. Implementation of Automatic Meter Reading System Using Wireless Sensor Network Volume 2, Issue 12, December 2013.
2. Yogendra P. Joshi, M.B. Tadwalkar,” Implementation of GSM based water meter a step towards automation in billing system” volume 9, Issue 4, Ver.I (Jul-aug 2014), PP 01-04. In (IOSRJECE)
3. Sushas S; Sachin Jain, Vinay Kumar, Kumar C.P, “Smart aqua meter”, Published in Electronics, Computers and communications (ICAECC), International Conference at Bangalore, 2014.
4. Ka Lun Lam, Hoi Yan Tung; Lap To Lee, Kim Fung Tsang, “ Zigbee automatic meter reading system-beeline of metering”, Published in Microwave Conference-APMC,2008.
5. M. K. B. M. N. Sangole, ‘GSM BASED PREPAID WATER CONTROL CIRCUIT SYSTEM FOR WATER METER,’ International Journal of Current Research, vol. Vol. 8, no. The issue,2, p. 4, February 2016.