Israeli Tech Start-up Saving Australian Water

An Israeli water technology start-up has picked up a slew of Australian contracts, after it saved Yarra Valley Water thousands of megalitres of water and millions of dollars by installing software that identifies and tracks leaks in real time

TaKaDu, founded in 2009 by tech entrepreneur Amir Peleg, uses algorithms to analyse data from smart sensors in the water systems to identify bugs in the water meters, leaks and faults in other equipment.

Yarra Valley Water was the first to adopt the technology in Australia, but now Sydney Water, Unitywater on the Sunshine Coast and Queensland Urban Utilities in Brisbane have also started using it.

Mr Peleg said the complex process was based on the simple idea that water usage occurred in patterns.

"There are patterns of water flow in your neighbourhood ... they depend on the time of the day, the day of the week and seasonality," he told The Australian Financial Review .

"When you have a pattern you can model it statistically. You learn what the right pattern is for a Tuesday in February in a certain neighbourhood ... the computer tracks these patterns and then you can see if there is a leak, or a burst, or if there's abnormal consumption going on."

Yarra Valley Water managing director Patrick McCafferty said the technology had saved the company millions of dollars and thousands of megalitres since its implementation.

"In the last three years we've saved about 2700 megalitres of water, which is about 1100 Olympic swimming pools of water ... which has worked out to be about $5000 a day in water savings," Mr McCafferty said.

"Yarra Valley Water has reduced from about 14 per cent to 10.8 per cent its water loss, and leakage is by far the most material element of this."

Mr Peleg said he started TaKaDu because of the size of the water industry, the access to venture capital for clean-tech ventures in 2008 and the drought in Israel.

"I sold my previous venture [YaData] to Microsoft in early 2008. In Israel that year we had a draught ... we weren't allowed to wash cars, we weren't allowed to water gardens and I thought to myself it was a bit ridiculous when I was willing to pay for water," he said.

"But then I learned some utilities were losing 20 to 30 per cent of their water ... If you look at other countries the problem was even worse."

He spent the next few months going to trade shows and learning about what technology was being developed in the industry.

"When you go to trade shows, the trick of an entrepreneur is not to see what is there, but to see what is not," he said. "There was this trend that they were lacking good software systems ... but I realised some of the utilities were accumulating a lot of data."

Source: Financial Review

Read More Related Content On This Topic - Click Here

Media

Taxonomy

• Technology
• Solutions
• Water Management