Milesight Delivers Turnkey IoT Solution for Smart Bin and Water Leak Management in Legacy Residential Buildings

Property management agencies face growing pressure to improve their operational efficiency, ensure customer satisfaction, and integrate legacy systems of buildings with new facilities expansion. LoRaWAN® offers ideal mechanisms to make building management more sustainable and productive. Easy-to-use and cost-effective sensors connect buildings and managers via valuable real-time data. Providing LoRaWAN® smart bin sensors and water leak detectors as well as software, Milesight enables facilities management companies to build up private networks under a scalable and secure infrastructure, at the meantime, various services are delivered on a unified and versatile platform.

Challenges

• Bin Management
  

As the number of bins is limited and shared among all residents, which often results in overflowing bins on some floors. Currently cleaning staff collects waste at a predetermined time and route regardless of the fill rate or level. Resources such as manpower and time are used inefficiently.

• Water Leak Detection
  

Common areas, waste bins, and garbage rooms within condos must be cleaned to a high standard. For the convenience of cleaning crews, a faucet is designed on each floor. But water leaks from a broken faucet or a leaky pipe will be a big deal when water seeps into an elevator pit or spread to tenants.

• Network Deployment
  

The prevailing traditional wired system is neither optimized nor efficient. Facilities management companies need to re-construct the cables, experiencing an extended construction delay and affording high expenses, and tenants have to endure troubles because of the re-construction.

Considering trash can empty efficiency, water damage prevention and wireless deployment, the LoRaWAN® based solution from Milesight has been submitted by Sonic Guard Technology Co., Ltd, which meets all the above needs and more.

Project

“Artisan Garden” is the latest completed high-quality residential project that was jointly developed by the HK New World Development Company Limited(NWD) and HK Urban Renewal Authority in the Ma Tau Kok area, offering 294 units on 31 floors. New World Property Management Co., Ltd. is a building management company that assists residential and property owner NWD in managing their requirements.

The property management company faces numerous problems while collecting waste like continuous checking of trash bin status (empty or full) to remove all waste at an appropriate time. From paper to food scraps to used paper toweling, residential building occupants generate a variety of waste and a lot of it. That is why developing a good waste management program can be time-consuming, frustrating, and costly. Therefore, the customer New World Property Management company wants an IoT-based solution to make their work easier by making the system smart, adequate, and self-sufficient.

Solution

This project presents the development of a smart bin monitoring and water leak detection system in order to measure waste level in the bin and detect the water leak in real-time, and alert the facilities supervisory, via LoRaWAN®. The proposed system consists of three parts: the smart bin sensors and water leak sensors, gateways, and a control station that stores and analyzes data for further use.

It supposes to generate and send the warning messages to the cleaning staff via mobile app pop-ups when the waste bin is full or almost full, so the garbage can be collected immediately. Furthermore, it is expected to contribute to improving the efficiency of property management.

Related Products

The following Milesight IoT devices were deployed at the condominium:

• UG65 indoor LoRaWAN® gateway with WiFi
• EM310-UDL smart bin sensor
• EM300-SLD water leakage detector
• Milesight IoT Cloud application platform for data analysis and reports

Prototype

Spread out through the building are several LoRaWAN® gateways and multiple sensors.

The smart bin sensor (EM310-UDL) makes use of ultrasonic distance measurement technology to monitor the available room of every bin in real-time. The spot leakage detection device (EM300-SLD) is vertically screwed on the bottom of the door to make sure its two probes are close to the floor, only when both of them touch the water simultaneously the alert can be triggered.

Milesight LoRaWAN® gateway is lying on a shelf at a higher position to provide signal coverage widely. Testing shows a single gateway could maintain acceptable signal strength placed at any position in a 12-story building. Due to the unique capability of low power wide area and deep penetration, the LoRa signal can be smoothly transmitted within the concrete building, which avoids the need for deploying a gateway at every story.

In addition to its long-range communication, the other important advantage of LoRaWAN® is its low power consumption. LoRa technology brings the potential for Milesight sensors to operate for up to 10 years without power recharging or battery replacement, which reduces the duration of the deployment and the associated costs.

When the data packages from smart bin sensors and spot leakage detection sensors reach the LoRaWAN® gateway, its embedded network server will forward them to the Milesight IoT Cloud platform, via the existing public Wi-Fi network.

Data Management

At first, the level or the height of the garbage in each bin is measured by using the ultrasonic sensor. This information is then received and processed on the Milesight IoT Cloud management center, where facilities supervisors will determine whether the garbage level has been surpassing the threshold level or not.

Since supervisors are often on duty in various parts of the residential building, in addition to the PC-based tunnel, the solution must also support mobile use. Thus, Milesight offers the IoT Cloud mobile option. This option allows for the facility supervisors to remotely check the bin status, and receive overflowing and water leakage alerts on their IOS or Android mobile terminals from anywhere in the building without having to go back to the management center.

Moreover, the accurate even report including abnormal devices, offline, disconnected can be also submitted to technicians for further analysis via Email or SMS.

Benefits

LoRa technology helps cut down on costs, ensuring no full bins will be overlooked, no water leaks go unnoticed, every trash container that needs to be emptied will be emptied timely and the water facility that needs to be repaired will be repaired promptly.

• • Intelligent LoRaWAN® devices reduce overflowing bins and water damage risks.
    
  • Server-based strategy in the cloud simplifies daily operations and maintenance.
    
  • Reduction of total solution expenses due to rapid deployment of wireless devices.
    
  • The system is easy to learn and operate that actively generates alerts.
    
  • Action can be taken quickly when an incident occurs because of the 24/7 monitoring system.