Semtech and Sindcon Avoid Unfair Billing with Optimized Smart Metering

Property managers of commercial real estate companies implement LoRa-based smart building solutions to cut costs and maximize efficiency with minimal investment in infrastructure and maintenance – all to create value for dwelling inhabitants and a potential revenue stream for the provided services.

An issue with larger buildings that have several tenants, however, is that manual metering is often a labor-intensive process and is prone to human error, resulting in unfair billing. This obviously leads to frustrated tenants.

To overcome this issue, Sindcon and IoT Kreasi Indonesia are leveraging Semtech’s LoRa devices and the LoRaWAN standard for its battery-powered smart water and electricity meters to streamline smart utilities operations for smart buildings.

Sindcon is a provider of LPWAN IoT metering solutions, and IoT Kreasi Indonesia is an end-to-end IoT solution provider. Together, they developed the battery-powered smart meters utilizing LoRaWAN to eliminate the manual energy and water meter reading process entirely. The smart meters further benefit from LoRaWAN connectivity for remote control of the water meters to open and close the water valve as needed.

“When designing our smart meters, reliability and constant connectivity were the key factors,” said Deyu Chen, CEO and co-founder of Sindcon. “The robustness of LoRaWAN helped us to achieve over 90% data success rate.”

The deployment of water and electricity meters installed in tall buildings is typical of dense urban environments with over 20,000 habitants per km² proving that LoRaWAN can support high density while ensuring a remaining capacity to add other applications in future.

And the success of the smart meters is seen in the LLOYD apartment complex located in Indonesia that covers a total area of .045 per km² with 27 towers. The result is an increase in tenant happiness.

“Due to the improved billing transparency, LLOYD tenant satisfaction increased more than 50% and are now empowered to monitor their own utilities usage daily with no surprise bill at the end,” said Aldi Kurniawan, CEO and co-founder of IoT Kreasi Indonesia.

The use-case scenario in the LLOYD complex proves that LoRaWAN meets the needs of the smart building segment by enabling efficient and economical use of a building’s resources.