IoT Based Water Management
1 2
Chanda Rajurkar , S R S Prabaharan , S.Muthulakshmi3
1 2,3
MTech, Embedded System, VIT Chennai Campus, 600127, India School of Electronics Engineering, VIT Chennai
Campus, 600127, India.
1 2
email: rajurkarchanda@gmail.com , prabaharan.srs@vit.ac.in ,muthulakshmi.s@vit.ac.in3
Phone: +91-909-659-1369
Abstract— Objectives: This project focuses on
monitoring of use of water, consider, by one block of house
in a flat system, where at the partition of pipeline from
where the water gets diverted to various part of a block.
Methods/Statistical analysis: Water places a vital role for
living beings in their day to day lives. The earth’s 71% is
covered by water is a ubiquitous fact. Among which Oceans
has approximately 96.50% and 3% is considered to be
freshwater, again out of which only 0.08% is accessible
direct to human use and rest is preserved in tundra regions
and in different form on and in the earth surface which is
very difficult to abstract for the human purposes. From this
it states that only 0.08% is available as fresh water for
human being to make use for drinking, domestic purposes,
sanitation, manufacturing, leisure, agriculture etc which gets
recharged by rain and snowfall 1.
Findings: According to scientists and organizations as
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), state
has come, since a long time, where water management as
such implies to maximizing use of water and minimizing the
wastage of water and thus preventing the domino effect cycle
arises as wastage of water. The sensors will sense the flow of
water to each pipe which ultimately tells the usage of water
at one block ideally. This water usage data would be sent to
cloud using the IOT (Internet of things) space. This cloud
data would be sent to the concern resident’s person’s mobile
app (application) reporting the water used and alerting the
user to limit the water use if it gets extended to the limit
usage set by municipal government or corporation. If the
limit gets extended the user have to pay accordingly. This
will be real time operation. The objective of doing so is for
limiting and minimizing the usage of water for an average of
per person. And secondly, the cloud data will be used as
statistic data for use of water at every seasons that is winter,
summer and monsoon so that measuring steps for water
management can be taken with the appropriate statistics,
yielding an avenue for predictive measure.
Improvements/Applications: To appraise the IOT based
water management, it can be ramified as diligent, frugal for
water management in a symbiotic parity way, which will
constrict the water resource evenly according to the in situ
factors.
Keywords: IOT, Water resources, scarcity, Water management,
limiting use, statistics.
978-1-5090-5913-3/17/$31.00 2017
c IEEE 255
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background
Nearly the third quarterly portion of the earth which
estimates upto 71% portion of it is covered with water.
But out of which only 0.08% fresh water is available for
human purposes and for living beings 1. The main sources
of fresh water available for living purposes and for human
use is the surface water available as a result of rainfall
which also recharges the lakes, different water resources
like aquifers. Water scarcity is the problem faced by the
living creatures throughout the history and whose
intensity has increased during the last centenary 2. It’s
estimated by next decade approximately 25% of the
population of earth will live in perpetual scarcity of water.
It’s a well known fact that physical factors affect the
availability of water which is the culmination of the
rainfall received by that area due to number of
geographical reasons, but it is also well documented fact
that human intervention is also affecting this factors
which leads to unseasonal as well as in abnormal
proportion of water fall and as a results the priorities of
the available water changes drastically.
Management of water gains importance to combat the
problem of scarcity. For sustainable use of water for
present and future generations, getting a balanced solution
by focusing human needs and the needs for the
environment is an important step 3.
1.2 Problem Overview and Scope of Work
As per Swedish expert Falken Mark, “When water
availability is less than 1,000 cubic meter per person per
day water stress occurs. Culmination of huge and
increasing population and evenly increasing demands for
water and uneven accessing to it is the main cause of
water scarcity." Behemoth population situated in a place
will naturally cause the usage of water in substantial
amount, even though if it uses for the purpose of daily
sustenance. Apart from agricultural purposes, the major
share in utilizing available fresh water is industries 4.
Industrialization and urbanization brought more use for
water especially at nuclear plants for cooling and also at
big factories. At this stage it is imperative, for proper
management and distribution of water, to conserve the
water resource, which will subsequently lead to not only
to substantial improvement in human life and condition
but also will benefit the different organs of the biomes
and ecosystems. New management strategies need to be
implemented in order to avoid setbacks and to fill up the
lacuna which generally occurs during the distribution of
water for various purposes in the allocation of water
resources. With this thought, the project focuses,
explicitly, on monitoring the usage of water. As
monitoring will help further for controlling and
distributing the water resource evenly according to the
region and availability of resource as per area. For this in
this project, ideally monitoring the usage of water by
particular house block and sending this data to cloud
through IOT (Internet of things) space. And getting the
update of usage of water through cloud to the mobile
application. The mobile application update helps in
controlling the usage of water, as the user will understand
whether he reached to the limitation of usage and if so
then how much extra charge it will need to pay. When
water will have charged according to usage and after
certain limit the usage exceed, people will start using
water carefully and will probably not over exploit water.
2. MATERIALS AND METHODS
2.1 Methodology
The work focused in this project is using Arduino, for
measuring the water flow from the pipe which divides the
flow of water to every parts of block, will get sense using
flow meter YF S201 or using solenoid 5. This data that is
flow rate which is nothing but the usage of water rating in
hours/liter, will be sent to cloud through IOT (Internet of
things) space 6. Then in return getting this data from cloud
to mobile application, the application which can be used
by the user or the head of corporation for monitoring and
controlling the supply of water. In this project, 3 water
flow meter is used, one for getting the total water
calculation in main tank and other two for the calculation
of water usage by two houses through the main tank. The
solenoid valve is also used to restrict the flow of water
when the water usage exceeds the limit.
2.2 Experimentation
Getting a precise flow measurement is an essential step
for quality distinction and for economical prospective. For
this project main hardware used are Arduino and water
flow sensor YF-S201. Flow meters have been verified as
excellent device for water flow measuring; using the
water flow sensor YF-S201 it is easy to construct a water
management system. To measure the amount of water
moved, pinwheel sensor is used, sensor sits within line of
water line. The development board is Arduino, which is
build using ATmega1280 microcontroller, which is
having a digital and analog IO pins, serial
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communication, data transfer buses, interrupts, memory,
etc. It needs 16 MHz of clock speed. Peripheral devices
such as GSM, GPS can be interfaced using its serial
interrupts named as serial and serial 1-3, which is used to
receive (RX) and transmit (TX) TTL serial data. To get
communicated with peripheral devices microcontroller
uses a synchronous serial data protocol that is SPI (serial
peripheral interface).
2.2.1 Interfacing of flow meter to Arduino
The arduino flow works on the principle of “Hall
Effect”. The voltage difference is induced in a conductor
transverse to the electric current and the magnetic field
perpendicular to it. In the flow meter Hall Effect is used,
it has a rotor shaped like small fan/propeller which is
arranged in the path of the liquid flowing. The water flow
sensor YF-S201 is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Water flow sensor YF-S201
When the water rushes through flow sensor, the flow of
water pushes the fans of the rotor resulting it to rotate.
Hall Effect sensor is connected to the shaft of the rotor.
Connection to the shaft of the rotor is the arrangement of
a current flowing coil and a magnet. As rotor rotates a
voltage/pulse is induced. For water flow sensor YF-S201
outputs about 4.5 pulses to each liter of liquid passing
through it per minute. Due to magnet attached to the rotor
shaft, the variation in magnetic field is seen. Arduino
measures the numbers of pulses generated. This pulse
reading by flow is calibrated in L/hr by simple formula.
The flow range of this sensor is 1-30L/MIN and water
pressure is less than or equal to 1.75MPa 7. To the water
flow sensor there are three wires, red wire that is for 5V
Vcc, black colour wire for Gnd, and usually yellow colour
for the signal/pulse line. The Vcc and Gnd of the flow
sensor is connected to the arduino’s Vcc and Gnd pin and
the pulse line is connected to one of arduino’s digital pin.
For clear understanding refer Figure 2.
 Figure 2: Pin configuration
Interfacing of arduino with one water flow sensor is
shown in Figure 3 and the water flow reading for one
sensor, at arduino serial window is shown in Figure 4.
Interfacing of arduino with three water flow sensor is
shown in Figure 5 and the water flow reading for three
sensors, at arduino serial window is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 3: Interfacing of arduino with one water flow
sensor
 includes the complete ThingSpeak API for processing
Figure 4: Reading on serial window of arduino for one
water flow sensor connected
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Figure 5: Interfacing of arduino with three water flow
sensor


Figure 6: Reading on serial window of arduino for three
water flow sensors connected
2.2.2 Connecting arduino to cloud
The three water flow readings, as the water flows
through sensor taken from digital pin of arduino is
displayed on the serial window of arduino, and also the
readings are sent to cloud through thingSpeak.
ThingSpeak provides a platform an open data. The data
taken from the sensors or boards like Arduino,
BeagleBone Black, Raspberry Pi and many other
hardware, is taken, stored, analyzed, viewed and actioned
using API for the Internet of Things. The Internet of
Things gives access to web services and embedded
devices. At GitHub ThingSpeak API is available and
HTTP requests, storing numeric and alphanumeric data,
numeric data processing, location tracking, and status
257
updates. The features of ThingSpeak are- real-time data
collection and storage, MATLAB analytics and
visualizations, alerts, scheduling, device communication,
open API, geolocation data, available on GitHub 8.
In this project, the water flow readings through arduino
is collected by thingSpeak and visualized in graphical
form. The data collection is real time data collection from
arduino. Figure 7 is the data reading of 3 flow sensor on
ThingSpeak.



Figure 8: Mobile Application GUI at download of
application


Figure 7: Data reading of 3 flow sensor on cloud
(ThingSpeak)

3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

As water flows, the usage of water is sent to cloud and
through cloud sent to mobile application, the application
will be the update for user to know how much of water
they have utilized and how much extra charge they will
pay for extra usage of water which is set value for all
users. Figure 8 shows the screen shot for mobile
application GUI (graphical user interface) after opening
the application, which shows the reading of use of water
by the houses and also the reading of the water in main
supply tank. Figure 9 shows screen display after clicking
on view chart in Mobile application and display the charts
that gives data reading of 3 flow sensors on ThingSpeak.

Figure 9: Screen display after clicking on view chart in
Mobile Application

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 4. CONCLUSION
By this project, it can be hoped that as stated in the aim
of this project that using this setup we can measure the
accurate water usage efficiently. And as living beings are
facing the problems of inefficiently the usage of water,
humans can minimize the wastage by optimizing the
usage of water in an opulent manner. The technology used
in designing has development board and the sensors,
which is sui generis and efficient. If humans succeeded in
saving at least 2 gallons of water per day per person, then
for the population of 1.252 billion of India, humans can
save 2.504 billion gallons of water per day ideally.

5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors wish to express their deep indebtedness to
the VIT University, Chennai for their support,
encouragement, and for providing facilities that made the
implementation of this project easier.

6. REFERENCES
1. Fry, Carolyn. The Impact of Climate Change: The
World's Greatest Challenge in the Twenty-first
Century, New Holland Publishers Ltd. 2008.
2. India set to become water scarce by 2025: report,
MUMBAI, May 25, 2015.
http://www.thehindu.com/. Date accessed: 22
February, 2016
3. Walmsly, N., & Pearce, G. Towards Sustainable
Water Resources Management: Bringing the
Strategic Approach up-to-date. Irrigation & Drainage
Systems, (2010); 24(3/4), 191-203.
4. Global changes in fresh water supply.
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/. Date accessed:
24 February, 2016
5. Yang Ji,et.al,“Analysis of Urban Residential Water
Consumption Based on Smart Meters and Fuzzy
Clustering”, IEEE(2015)
6. Haijiang Tai,et.al.“An Integrated System for
Advanced Water Risk Management Based on Cloud
Computing and IoT”, IEEE(2015)
7. Datasheet of Arduino.
http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/127788/7/D-c-
%20Arduino%20uno.pdf. Date accessed: 24
February, 2016
8. Thingspeak official site. https://thingspeak.com/.
Date accessed: 24 February, 2016

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