Water loss is an absence. That is why nobody sees it. What is a solution?
Rural water systems rarely fail abruptly. A leak presents as a slow divergence between what a system should deliver and what it does. The conventional alternative to measurement is a monthly manual reading, taken by a technician trained to operate a tap rather than to interpret a trend. Losses surface only when a tank runs dry or the revenue fails to reconcile. By then the leak is months old and nobody can say when it began. Non-revenue water is hard to see because it is an absence. There is no incident, no complaint, no line in the ledger. Water is produced, water is not paid for, and the gap sits unmeasured until it becomes a shortage. As the operator we carry both sides of that gap: the revenue those litres should have earned, and the cost of the repair when it is finally found. Deferral is not available to us. The only real variable is whether we find the leak while it is still small. Over the past 6 months we have been embe...
