From Billing To Intelligence: How Smart Submetering Is Reshaping Water Management

Water is often the top utility expense for commercial properties, particularly for multifamily buildings. 

As water costs rise, undetected leaks, inefficient allocation methods and delayed response times to maintenance requests create compounding challenges for owners and operators. These issues can lead to property damage, tenant disputes and unexpected costs that directly impact net operating income.

As a result, commercial real estate leaders are rethinking how they manage their spaces, with water submetering, or the process of installing a meter for each unit, a top option — particularly as more municipalities implement regulations to combat unfair billing practices.   

“Traditional submetering in multifamily and commercial real estate has been very one-dimensional,” said Jeff Morrison, senior director of real estate at Aquana, a Geospace Technologies brand. “We've taken submetering and made it a smart, modular ecosystem.”

Morrison said that until now, intelligence features that operate in real time hadn’t been integrated into water submetering. Many systems collect meter readings hours or days apart, which then require processing in the cloud or back-end databases, limiting their ability to catch issues as they happen. 

But even collecting readings six hours apart leaves enough room for a pipe to burst and wreak havoc.

To address these legacy issues, Aquana has developed a system that moves beyond simple measurement, Morrison said. 

Modular Approach To Water Management

At the center of Aquana’s approach is a modular system of connected devices designed to give owners and operators greater visibility and control over how water moves through their buildings.

Aquana’s software and hardware function together seamlessly, Morrison said. Depending on their needs, customers can adopt one or all products.

AquaControl is Aquana’s software that analyzes data, including unit-level consumption and flow analysis, and warns the user of any leaks or anomalies in real time. Users can think of this product as Aquana’s “cloud,” accessible by internet browser or mobile application.

Aquana’s hardware includes AquaSense, an indoor smart valve that measures water flow for leak detection and enables remote shut-off; AquaFlow, an outdoor smart valve providing similar capabilities for outdoor systems; and AquaLink, a new transceiver designed to bring visibility into water consumption patterns to allow for better and faster operational decisions. 

AquaLink has yet to be unveiled to the public, but it is poised to be another crucial solution in Aquana’s ecosystem, Morrison said. 

“We’re creating a comprehensive ecosystem of devices to attack the water management problem that so many properties face,” said Steve Askew, managing director of the Aquana brand for Geospace. “There are leak detection platforms and shut-off valves out there, but they do not support revenue-grade submetering for resident billing. We’re one cohesive system that has it all included in one platform.”

The cherry on top? Not only are all of Aquana’s products designed to work together cohesively, but as a smart water business under the Geospace Technologies brand, a company that has more than four decades of seismic and water management experience, it manufactures its products domestically, Askew said. 

AquaSense, Aquana's Bestseller

Aquana’s top-selling product for multifamily properties is AquaSense. Reporting usage data back to AquaControl in real time, property managers and owners no longer have to worry about small pipe leaks turning into bigger issues. The valve monitors anomalies, and if an issue is detected, it can shut off the source remotely. 

This is crucial, especially if property management isn’t on-site at that moment or if the leak happens in a unit that is unoccupied, easily going unnoticed. 

“What our competitors do today is they'll transmit data every six hours back to their cloud application, but only on constant flow, no high-flow capabilities,” Morrison said. “We've really set ourselves apart in terms of leak detection. We use edge-based algorithms, meaning the data is processed instantly on the device itself, rather than waiting for a round trip to the cloud, to surface those anomalies faster.”

What makes this Aquana’s bestselling product? AquaSense is available for all common residential pipe sizes and runs on Long Range Wide Area Network, Bluetooth or Long Term Evolution Machine Type Communication systems, easily integrating with almost any building or structure, no matter if the building is brand new or decades old.  

Rather than just an on-off switch, AquaSense was designed with a “reduced flow” setting, giving owners and property managers greater operational control over their submeter system, which translates into cost savings, Morrison said. 

In a survey conducted by the National Apartment Association, nearly 60% of respondents said the No. 1 hurdle in property management was operational efficiency, placing reducing building costs as their top priority.

“AquaSense not only allows for conservation of water due to its remote shut-off capabilities, but that directly translates into cost savings, which is so crucial for owners and managers today,” Morrison said. 

Submetering As A Cost-Saving, Efficiency Strategy

Since 2020, Americans’ water and sewer bills have risen by 24% on average. In the 2010s, water and sewer bills increased by 43%, faster than any other utility during the same period.

To combat these rising utility costs and systemic inefficiencies, states such as California and Georgia have enacted water submetering regulations for multifamily properties. However, when submetering isn't a requirement, owners often use different allocation methods, such as the ratio utility billing system, or RUBS, in which the total bill for the building is divided based on unit square footage, number of occupants or a combination of these factors. 

An accurate submeter will allow owners to recover 100% of the unit costs back through resident billing, whereas with RUBS, this isn’t an easy feat, Morrison said. 

“Submeters prevent billing residents for water they did not consume and eliminate resident complaints and conflict with property management,” he said. “If residents are happy, everyone is happy.”

With each passing year, owners that use RUBS are realizing that as costs rise, it is cutting deeper into their pockets, Morrison said. Submetering is a far more efficient approach in every aspect of the equation. 

“Aquana’s modular ecosystem is at the forefront of innovation in the sector,” Morrison said. “Its intelligent features, coupled with its flexibility, are really something this sector hasn’t seen yet, especially at the price it's being offered at. It’s changing the way the industry thinks about utilities.”

This article was produced in collaboration between Geospace Technologies and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.