Conexie

Detecting a Water Leak Before the Bill Arrived

After installing pulse-output water meters connected to Conexie, the team spotted overnight usage patterns that shouldn't have existed. They found and fixed the leak within days, saving an estimated $18,000 per year.

Water Monitoring

Challenge

A food processing facility suspected they had a water leak but couldn't prove it. Their quarterly water bills were inconsistent, and manual meter reads weren't frequent enough to catch it.

Result

After installing pulse-output water meters connected to Conexie, the team spotted overnight usage patterns that shouldn't have existed. They found and fixed the leak within days, saving an estimated $18,000 per year.

Inconsistent bills with no explanation

The food processing facility had been seeing quarterly water bills that varied by 20 to 30 percent without any obvious operational reason. Production volumes hadn't changed significantly. The headcount was stable. There had been no major equipment additions. The site's facilities manager suspected a leak, but with only quarterly meter reads and no sub-metering, there was no way to confirm it, let alone locate it. The utility provider's advice was to commission a plumber to walk the site — an exercise that found nothing conclusive.

Installing pulse-output water meters

Conexie specified pulse-output water meters for the facility's main connection point and the three largest sub-circuits: the production line water supply, the cooling system, and the amenities block. Pulse-output meters are a cost-effective way to bring existing water infrastructure into a monitoring platform — the meters connect to Conexie data loggers and report consumption in 5-minute intervals rather than waiting for a manual quarterly read. Installation was completed in a day, with no interruption to production.

Overnight flow as the diagnostic signal

Within 48 hours of the meters going live, the pattern was clear. Between midnight and 5am — hours when the facility was closed and no water should have been used — the main meter was recording consistent flow of approximately 12 litres per minute. The production and amenities sub-circuits were both at zero. The cooling system circuit was showing the flow. This pointed to a valve on the cooling circuit that was not closing fully when the system shut down at the end of each production shift.

Locating and fixing the fault

Armed with the interval data showing exactly when and at what rate the flow was occurring, the facilities manager directed a plumber to the cooling system specifically rather than conducting a general site inspection. The faulty valve was identified and replaced within two days. Conexie's platform confirmed the fix the following night: overnight flow on the cooling circuit dropped to zero and has remained there since.

Quantifying the saving and ongoing monitoring

Modelling the overnight flow rate against the facility's water tariff put the annual cost of the undetected leak at approximately $18,000 — a figure that had been absorbed into 'unexplained' quarterly bill variation for an estimated 18 months before monitoring was in place. The return on the monitoring hardware and installation was achieved in the first month of operation. The facility now runs the Conexie water monitoring continuously, with alerts configured to notify the facilities manager whenever overnight flow on any sub-circuit exceeds a minimal threshold.