One of the schools in a group of nine suffered significant damage after a pipe burst overnight. The issue wasn’t discovered until the next morning when the facilities team arrived — the pipe had been leaking since the school closed the previous day.
Like many campuses, this school is made up of several separate buildings, each with its own purpose — such as a main building with a canteen, a sports hall, and a sixth form block. Naturally, each building has different water usage patterns depending on its function.
The estate managers were looking for a smarter way to:
- Detect burst pipes early
- Control how much water each building can use when occupied
- Spot low-level leaks (like running toilets or faulty valves) when buildings are unoccupied
Our Solution: xFlow Smart Water Monitoring
We recommended installing our xFlow system in each of the 9 buildings
xFlow’s flexible programming gives estate managers full control over water use and early warning of leaks. Here’s how it helps:
- Custom Scheduling:Managers can set high-use and low-use time periods for each building, adjusting by day and time.
- Usage Limits:They can define how much water is allowed during each period in each building. If usage goes over the limit, it may indicate a leak, and the system will shut off the water to that building.
- Temporary Overrides:They can temporarily raise the limit for up to 2 hours for planned events like deep cleaning or pressure washing.
- Holiday Mode:Water can be completely shut off to all buildings during school holidays, when maintenance staff aren’t on site.
Real-Time Leak Alerts
The school’s maintenance staff provide a 24/7 emergency response. If xFlow detects unusual water usage (a potential leak), it sends an instant alert using NB-IoT (Narrowband Internet of Things) technology. Staff are notified by email and/or SMS, with details about the time of the incident and which building triggered the alert.
In an update from the managers nine months after installation, the system had already detected several small leaks and successfully shut off a burst pipe in one of the buildings, and the school Board are planning to roll leak detection out to their other sites.
