Overview

Heliotics helps companies implement IoT solutions to reduce costs and increase operational efficiency in a wide range of business verticals, including smart city applications like waste management, smart parking, and smart meters.Working with business partner Relaxed s.r.o. for certified installation, Heliotics provides water metering services to building management and apartment building clients in three major cities in Slovakia.

Challenge

Apartment buildings and management companies have to report water usage for billing. Most companies utilize offline reading or walk-by reading. These processes lead to the following challenges:

1. Manual collection of meter readings is a highly time and resource consuming task, where employees have to physically knock on doors, coordinate with residents, and log data.

2. Walk-by reading presents similar challenges, as physically dispersed meters make data collection expensive and infrequent.

3. Infrequent readings (monthly or yearly), result in a lack of predictability and detection of unusual events. This leads to undetected issues, wasted resources and higher costs to the consumer.

Alternative remote reading options like WM-bus solutions can be battery intensive and expensive.

Furthermore, in a directive approved by the European Union in 2018, meters and heat cost allocators installed after October 2020 must be remotely readable devices. Already installed meters and heat cost allocators, in most cases must be replaced or retrofitted with remotely readable devices by January 2027, mandating that these issues be addressed.

Results Snapshot

• 100% Compliance: 24/7 remote reading solutions that are entirely compliant with EU directives for remotely readable meters.

• 5X+ Lower Infrastructure Costs: When compared with alternative options like wM-Bus, infrastructure hardware investments are about 5X lower.

• 5 Year Deployment: with up to 10 years of battery life and government mandates to calibrate or replace devices every 5 years in Europe, installations can last 5 years in the EU or longer globally.

• 99% Satisfaction: management and end users of 2,000+ connected devices report high satisfaction.

Solution

With the need for remotely readable devices in addition to consumption reports available to individuals, Helium LoRaWAN provides a stand-out solution to reduce manual or walk-by readings, increase efficiency of data collection, reduce network deployment costs, and maximize the battery life of devices.

Heliotics cost-effective water metering solutions provide clients with the following benefits:

• Real-time, stable, and reliable data for monitoring consumption and abnormalities for apartment owners and building managers.

• Automatically generated reports, bills or invoices for building managers.

• Effective coverage with one gateway able to cover up to 5km in urban areas and connect 800+ sensors.

• Energy efficient sensors with batteries lasting up to 10 years with regular data transmission.

“There is coverage almost everywhere, and where there isn’t we can easily create it for a lower cost than would be required with a standard ISP or alternative operator.”

—Miroslav, Heliotics

Results

1. Cost Savings.

Remote solutions provide cost savings by eliminating tedious manual data collection in addition to reducing waste with fast and efficient detection of abnormalities. Alternative popular options like wM-Bus connectivity requires about 5-6X the number of gateways that LoRaWAN requires at a similar price point to cover the same area. This results in about 5-6X initial gateway cost savings when using LoRaWAN, in addition to water consumption reduction, connectivity cost savings, simplified installation, and/or reduced on-site staff hours.

2. 100% Compliance with EU Directives.

24/7 real-time data access is provided to individual apartment owners to eliminate unexpected costs at the end of a billing period and monitor overall usage. Building managers can take quick action in case of malfunction, leakage, or abnormal usage. 25+ buildings and 2,000+ apartments where solutions have been deployed are 100% compliant with EU directives.

3. Reduced Labor.

Automated billing and readings eliminate manual data collection, processing, and submission of data through legacy systems.

4. 5-Year+ Deployments.

Sensor batteries can last up to 10 years, and can be managed entirely remotely after physical installation. EU directives mandate re-calibration or replacement every 5 years, so deployments last the entirety of the 5-year time frame or longer in other locations.

What's next?

Heliotics is continuing to expand across Europe, deploying projects in additional verticals like waste management, water tank monitoring, and cargo theft. There will soon be support for heat cost allocator sensors that will be managed alongside water metering data to bring another level of automated billing and value to building management companies and tenants.

“This is so scalable. It can be expanded to any country, translated to any language, and even white labeled across the globe.”

—Miroslav, Heliotics