Combining artificial intelligence and machine learning, Australian start-up Sytewave has developed and patented a system that accurately detects water leaks over a wide area in a matter of seconds.

Quite simply, said the company’s CEO, Rick Brown, “We are on a mission to save our planet’s most precious resource, water.”

Sytewave’s leak detection, monitoring and analysis system is far more advanced from anything on the market today in rapidly finding and reporting leaks in real time.

Its patented technology does not require a water system to be turned off and it can detect multiple leaks from up to 7.5 kilometers away in seconds and accurate within one square meter.

During a trial at one of Brisbane’s aquatic centers, Sytewave found a leak that two other leak detection companies failed to find. Six months earlier, the pool was losing 15 thousand liters of water a day.

Sytewave combines artificial intelligence with machine learning to deploy its harmless approach to leak detection to rapidly determine the exact location of leaks in a water system.

Its state-of-the-art, cloud-based monitoring system works year-round to immediately find leaks in pipe infrastructure. When leaks are found, alerts and reports are sent so that a team can be deployed to fix the problems.

Sytewave measures and calculates the distinct signature a leak makes within one square meter.

The Sytewave technology doesn’t listen at the source of a problem, which is time consuming and inefficient and mostly inaccurate.

Sytewave’s harmless signal is so powerful that it listens further away to analyse an entire infrastructure. Even if a network of city pipes is 100 kilometers long, Sytewave can test an entire system with multiple pings to accurately find leaks.

Testing over a wide area accurately and rapidly makes for an efficient system.

“Sytewave is leaps ahead of the competition and our monitoring service detects leaks faster and more reliably than anyone on the planet,” Brown said. “Faster leak discovery leads to millions of liters of water saved each year, and that’s a problem worth investing in.”

A typical customer can save around 70 percent of their annual costs from water loss using Sytewave.

More than 91 billion gallons of water are lost through drinking water supply networks every day across the globe. If this volume of water loss is reduced by just 30 percent, 800 million people could be supplied with already treated water.

In the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, utilities lose a staggering 1.7 trillion gallons per year through distribution system leaks, at a cost of $2.6 billion.

Much of this wasted, treated water is lost through the 240,000 water main breaks that take place annually across the country. And with many older pipes outlasting their intended life expectancy, break rates have seen an increase of 27 percent over the last six years.

Sytewave was founded in 2021 in Brisbane, Australia with a global mission to help utilities and large infrastructures rapidly identity leaks to minimize the damage and loss to our planet.