Hyderabad water board to study feasibility of automating its traditional valves 

The Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply & Sewerage Board (HMWS&SB) will take up a feasibility study of operating up to 1000 of its various valves using smart technology.

Banking on the success registered in the Sanathnagar operation and management division, the Board chief K. Ashok Reddy has instructed officials to chalk out plans to conduct a study on experimental basis.

The idea is to set up a control room at the head office and design a system to operate, control, and monitor the valves through a unified system. He said that the technology use should be designed so that the performance of smart meters, quantity and quality of water distributed, as well as billing details, can be linked to this system to improve operational efficiency.

The Board operates over 15,000 various big and small valves in the city to supply water to consumers on a daily basis. Of them, at least 35% are operated regularly by linemen in various areas.

But a majority of the valves are also on the arterial and other busy and narrow lanes in the city often causing risks to the linemen, who go from field to field to operate. The Board says that certain incidents in the past have also resulted in the loss of life and limb of its linemen.

With smart valve technology, valve operation becomes an application-based operation from a phone, through Internet of Things (IOT) communication. Quality of water, quantity supplied, chlorine content, other parameters, and contamination can be monitored in real time on a dashboard.

Mr. Ashok Reddy also suggested officials to install smart meters at the reservoir outlets and in areas with bulk connections so that technology can be used to bring every drop supplied into account and help conservation.