MUSCAT:Any undetected water leak can cause your utility bill to run in hundreds of Omani riyals.

But Oman’s Public Authority of Electricity and Water (DIAM) has a smart solution to the problem. DIAM will install more than 270,000 Smart Water meters in homes in Oman, which will give an hourly update of water consumption. 

In an interview with national daily Oman Observer, Hilal Al Abri, Project Manager for the Smart Water project, said the installation of smart water meters will help to reduce the complaints of bills for unused water. As a start 271,000 users in Muscat area will be provided with the smart water meters. “This will give them hourly update of their water consumption and give them better control over the water use,” Al Abri told Observer. 

This ‘Build and Operate’ move, a first-of-its-kind in the country, follows the earlier experience of installing nearly 10,000 such meters in Musandam.

Many residents had detailed on social media how they got the shock of their lives after seeing their utility bills skyrocket in the last few months. 

While admitting that there were human errors in billing, Al Abri said the new system will eliminate such issues in the future. “This new smart solution to water meter reading will eliminate the challenges faced by the utility providers when collecting meter readings, especially in isolated residential locations,” he said. According to Al Abri, the smart water meter automatically collects consumption data and transfers it to a central database for billing, troubleshooting and evaluation and will be shown on a portal on the consumers’ smart phones and on a dedicated application.

In the initial phase in Musandam, 9,995 consumers were connected with smart meters. “The results were really inspiring,” Al Abri added. 

The system, rolled out in collaboration with the National Electricity and Energy Centre at a cost of OMR 25 million, is based on Internet of Things technology (IoT), which will read the consumption and update the user every hour on 24×7 basis.