By John Calder, Technical Director, Dura Pump
As AI technology continues to reshape industries, the UK water sector is one of many exploring its potential applications. AI-driven monitoring is starting to make a cautious entrance to the world of smart pumps and John Calder, technical director at Dura Pump, explores how this adoption could drive resilience, efficiency, and compliance.
A recent report from the UK Water Partnership (UKWP) highlighted the considerable potential for the adoption of artificial intelligence across the UK water sector. The white paper, AI Within Reach, sets out a roadmap for the industry to utilise AI to tackle climate change, improve resilience, and deliver ambitious capital programmes.
With increasingly ambitious trials and predictions being announced, the potential application of AI in the water sector is already quietly transforming the water and pumps sector. As the UKWP report highlights, existing practical cases of AI include smart energy systems optimising pump usage with renewables and customer chatbots explaining storm overflow data in plain English.
We’ve been harnessing smart pump technology and Internet of Things (IoT) integrations to increase efficiencies and data sharing between systems for a number of years and these potential developments in AI offer huge additional benefits for the industry.
Recent years have seen significant advances in smart pump technology, helping to improve energy efficiency, enable remote monitoring, and reduce maintenance costs. AI has the potential to boost this further, helping businesses and public institutions reduce the need for expensive engineer callouts and deliver maximum pump performance and efficiency.
The rise of smart pumps
Smart pumps have seen a significant increase in demand, with forecasts predicting growth at a CAGR of 8.5% between 2023 and 2028. This growing adoption could help the global pumps market reach £72.7 billion by 2029.
Facilities managers have faced rising costs and greater impacts from pump downtime in recent years. More complex production processes and supply chains, not to mention the effects of global instability and the implementation of tariffs, have pushed up the cost and complexity of resolving issues.
As the prospect of downtime becomes even more challenging, more businesses and organisations are proactively monitoring pump health to spot potential problems early.
We’re continuing to see greater efforts to improve understanding of pump system health—not only to reduce the risk of expensive engineer callouts or component replacements but also to maximise performance and energy efficiency.
Technological improvements are facilitating this deeper understanding. Remote monitoring enables facilities managers to receive data for common triggers, such as a reduction in water flow rate (which could indicate a blockage) or a loss of power to a tripped pump.
Some of the more advanced smart pumps and sensors allow engineers to collect even richer data, including water quality, pH, cleanliness, temperature, and chlorine levels.
Among the most effective smart pump applications are cooling system optimisation, limiting wastewater blockages, and maintaining consistent water pressure. For large, complex buildings like hospitals, universities, and prisons, these applications are already proving to be game-changers for delivering consistent and efficient utilities.
The potential case for using AI
The continued rollout of smart pumps is being driven by significant advances in sensory technology, the falling cost of connected hardware, and increasingly intelligent predictive analytics.
These factors are making real-time monitoring more affordable and accessible, enabling even more businesses to benefit from up-to-the-minute reports and analytics of their pump systems anywhere in the world.
The business case for smart pumps is already clear: lower energy consumption, reduced maintenance costs, and improved compliance capabilities. We expect to see AI and machine learning accelerate these benefits even further.
Smart pumps can flag issues such as blocked valves, broken pipework, motor problems, or even highlight a legionella risk by tracking feed temperatures from water tanks.
Return water temperatures can be monitored and pumps modulated accordingly, which in some cases has driven energy savings in excess of 50%. With the additional application of machine learning and AI, systems can be further optimised, including adjustments to boilers, pumps, valves, and the entire distribution network.
These are just a few examples of how savings can be achieved from what is a relatively small part of a much larger system. Using AI to explore interactions between all components within a heating system, for instance, could unlock even greater energy savings and maintenance reductions across an entire building management system (BMS).
As more smart pumps are introduced into systems, the additional data will enrich AI-driven models further, increasing the potential for further learning and optimisation. We’ve already seen how AI applications can analyse huge datasets in other industries, and these models can understand trends that aren’t currently visible using human analysis.
While we continue to discover the various ways in which AI could revolutionise water management and the pumps industry, there’s never been a better time to embrace the smart pump technology that is available right now. With increasing pressure around budgets, sustainability and compliance, the efficiency and maintenance benefits are becoming increasingly important and are available now.
