DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF AN IOT-BASED WATER MONITORING SYSTEM

Water scarcity, due to population growth, urbanization, and aging infrastructure, requires new developments in sustainable water management. A serious problem arises as a significant amount of treated water is lost through unmonitored excessive consumption within the distribution networks. The existing monitoring systems, most of which rely on static threshold based alerts, are reactive for the most part and are considered insufficient in terms of the detection of subtle anomalies or the prediction of infrastructure failures. This project presents the design and implementation of an IoT-based water leakage/flow monitoring and detection system that can provide a better solution for real time water resource management. The methodology involves a hardware system consisting of an ESP32 microcontroller, an integrated YF-S201 Hall effect flow sensor, an integrated HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor for water level sensing, and a relay module for the automated pump control. It also has a full-stack application named FlowSync,that was developed using the MERN stack and WebSocket communication (Socket.io) for data visualization and remote system control in a secure and real-time environment. System evaluation demonstrated the following performances: The HC-SR04 sensor exhibited minor deviations ranging from -0.2 L to +0.5 L. For data latency at the web interface, the average was 5s, triggering automated pump shut-off and on in 5s. Long-term testing performed over 48 hours resulted in 10 Wi-Fi disconnections with the pump control execution of 83 percent. These results mean that the developed IoT system can be an effective, and reliable alternative to conventional methods by offering continuous monitoring, and automatic response to minimize water loss and improve the efficiency of the system. Future work will investigate the integration of machine learning for predictive analytics and also explore expanding the system's coverage