Mackay council signs multi-million dollar "smart-water" app deal

Mackay Regional Council in Queensland has signed a multi-million dollar deal to commercialise its “smart-water” application, called MiWater.

Image by Kgbo - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53019634

The deal gives Australian smart water meter and sensing company Taggle Systems rights to the MiWater intellectual property and existing customer contracts.

The council claims that more than 110,000 homes and businesses use MiWater, which informs them about water leaks and high water usage. The information comes from smart water meters and sensors.

More than 14,000 Mackay residents also use the associated myH2o website to keep track of how much water they use. The council claims the software helped identify and notify Mackay consumers of about 35,000 water leaks in 2018. Other councils also use the software.

Overall, MiWater has helped identify leaks totalling six billion litres of water, according to Mackay Regional Council.

The software has also helped Mackay win two innovation awards.

Mackay Regional Council started developing the software in 2014, with development work handled by the 11-person Mackay company Tyeware.

Taggle Systems supports the software for Mackay Regional Council and other users and will continue to do so.  

It plans on working with Tyeware to further develop the software and expand its user base in Australia and overseas.

The value of the deal has not been made public.