The challenge
Across South Africa, a worrying share of supply systems fail or barely pass quality tests, and national supply reliability has slipped well below where it should be. For a water-services authority, the danger is the gap between samples: chlorine residual can fall, turbidity can spike after a treatment hiccup or a network event, and — relying on periodic lab grabs — nobody knows until the next sample is taken and analysed. By then, out-of-spec water may already have reached households.
The core gap: a lab sample is a snapshot. Between snapshots, quality can drift unseen — and a public-health risk that's discovered days late is a risk that's already been delivered to the tap.
Our approach
- Continuous online quality sensing. Turbidity, residual chlorine, pH and conductivity at the treatment outlet and key network points — the parameters that signal whether the water is safe right now (see water quality sensors explained).
- Breach alerts, not after-the-fact reports. Thresholds set inside the safe limits, so a drift in chlorine or a turbidity spike alerts the right person immediately — time to act before it spreads through the network.
- Complement, don't replace, the lab. Online sensing gives live coverage between accredited lab samples, with calibration planned in so readings stay trustworthy.
- Reach the whole system. Remote reservoirs and outlying points on low-power/solar sensing, edge-buffered so load shedding doesn't blind the network — on the addaNet platform.
- Build the evidence. A continuous quality record supports regulatory reporting and the public trust a utility runs on.