Water telemetry in Tanzania — know every borehole, tank and pump without driving there.
addanode puts levels, flows, pressures and pump status from boreholes, wellfields, tanks and pump stations onto one dashboard — for urban water authorities and community supplies alike. Solar-powered where there is no mains, store-and-forward where there is no signal, and built to run for months between technician visits.
The failures telemetry catches before your customers do.
Pumps running dry
A borehole pump that keeps running as the water table drops burns out its motor — and the first sign is a dead scheme and an expensive replacement. Level and current monitoring with automatic dry-run protection stops the pump before the damage, and tells you why.
Tanks that empty overnight
When a reservoir empties at 03:00, the town finds out at 06:00. Continuous tank-level telemetry with WhatsApp alerts means the duty operator finds out at 03:05 — while there is still time to switch pumps or close a valve.
Water you produce but never bill
Non-revenue water hides between the wellfield meter and the customer meters. Continuous bulk-meter reconciliation — production versus district consumption — shows which zone is losing water and whether it's leakage, metering or something else.
Engineered for Tanzanian water schemes.
- Schemes far from technicians. Many Tanzanian boreholes and wellfields are hours — sometimes days — from the nearest instrumentation technician. Our field equipment is chosen for long service intervals: long-life batteries, sealed enclosures, remote diagnostics and over-the-air updates, so a scheme in Mtwara or the Lake Zone doesn't wait for a road trip.
- Solar pump sites with no mains at all. Solar-powered boreholes are common in regions far from the grid. Our telemetry runs from the same panel or its own small panel and battery, and reports production, level and pump behaviour daily — the difference between a working scheme and one that quietly failed weeks ago.
- Load management at pump stations. Where stations are grid-fed, hydro-dry years bring rationing. Battery-buffered loggers record right through the outage, so you can separate "no water because no power" from "no water because the pump is failing".
- Patchy coverage between towns. We match the link to the site: 4G where available, private LoRaWAN from wellfield to office where nothing else reaches. Every device stores and forwards — a coverage gap never becomes a data gap.
- Institutional reality. Tanzania's water sector spans urban water supply and sanitation authorities, rural schemes and community-based water supply organisations — with very different budgets. Deployments scale from one borehole with one level sensor to a full network with district metering.
What a water telemetry deployment in Tanzania looks like.
1 · Boreholes & wellfields
Water level, pump current, flow and daily production per borehole — with dry-run protection that stops the pump before the motor cooks.
2 · Tanks & reservoirs
Level telemetry with high/low WhatsApp alerts, overflow detection and trend history — sized from a village tank to a city reservoir.
3 · Pump stations
Run status, starts per hour, pressure and energy per cubic metre — reading existing starters and meters over Modbus where they exist.
4 · Network & NRW
Bulk-meter reconciliation between production and district consumption, minimum night flow, and pressure logging to find the zones that leak.
Hardware is pre-configured in Johannesburg and installed by local partners or your own electricians and plumbers under our remote guidance — a single borehole cluster is typically live within weeks of the remote assessment.
Tanzanian scheme types and the sensors each needs
| Scheme type | Sensors | Constraint that decides the design |
|---|---|---|
| Urban WSSA network | Bulk input meters, reservoir levels, DMA inlet flow | EWURA benchmarking — NRW 42.3% nationally, 14 hours of supply |
| Village and community scheme (COWSO) | Tank level, pump state, solar node | No grid, no fibre, no resident technician |
| Wellfield and borehole | Abstraction meter, water level, pump current | Permit volumes; pump burn-out on a dry aquifer |
| Prepaid kiosk scheme | Delivered volume vs vend records, tank level | Token systems that go offline; disputes settled by an independent count |
| Treatment works | Turbidity, chlorine residual, flow | Quality between laboratory samples |
From city networks to village schemes.
Urban water supply and sanitation authorities running networks in cities like Dar es Salaam, Dodoma, Mwanza, Arusha, Mbeya and Tanga · community-based water supply organisations running village boreholes and gravity schemes · private operators — estates, factories, lodges and mines that run their own water supply. Industrial water users often start here and grow into the full addaNet platform; mine dewatering and process water belong with mining & cement monitoring. Everything runs on the same platform, back at the Tanzania hub.
Water telemetry in Tanzania — common questions
How does borehole monitoring work in Tanzania?
A level sensor in the borehole, a current transformer on the pump and a small telemetry unit at the wellhead. The unit reports water level, pump status and daily production to the addaNet dashboard, and raises a WhatsApp alert on dry-run risk, missed pumping or abnormal current — whether the site is grid, generator or solar powered.
Can telemetry work at solar pump sites with no mains power?
Yes. The telemetry runs from the pump's solar system or its own small panel and battery, and is designed for exactly this case: low power draw, local logging, and store-and-forward transmission when the network allows. Solar schemes in regions far from technicians are where remote visibility pays back fastest.
What is dry-run protection and why does it matter?
Dry-run protection stops a pump when the water level falls below a safe intake depth, instead of letting it run hot and destroy the motor. Replacing a burned-out submersible pump at a remote Tanzanian scheme costs far more than the sensor that would have saved it — and leaves the community without water while a replacement travels from Dar es Salaam.
Can telemetry help reduce non-revenue water?
Yes — it provides the numbers the NRW fight needs: continuous bulk-meter readings at production points, district-metered consumption, minimum night flow and pressure logs. Telemetry doesn't fix leaks, but it shows which zone to dig in and proves whether the fix worked.
Does it work where there is no mobile coverage?
Yes. For wellfields and tanks beyond mobile coverage we use private LoRaWAN: sensors talk to your own gateway at a point that does have connectivity — an office, a powered pump station, a hilltop mast. No mobile operator is involved, and every device buffers locally regardless.
What maintenance does the equipment need?
Very little by design: sealed enclosures, multi-year battery life on sensor nodes, remote diagnostics and over-the-air updates. The realistic maintenance model in Tanzania is an occasional visit by a local technician with our engineers on WhatsApp — not a resident instrumentation team, so that is what we engineer for.
Who typically pays for and owns the system?
The scheme owner — an urban authority, a community organisation or a private operator. You own the hardware and the data; addaNet is the platform it reports to (cloud or on-premise). Costs are quoted as a written band after a free remote assessment of your scheme list.
Put your whole water scheme on one screen.
Send us your list of boreholes, tanks and pump stations — get a written proposal with honest cost bands, sized for Tanzanian budgets.