{"id":22708809,"date":"2023-05-23T06:58:26","date_gmt":"2023-05-23T13:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenewstack.io\/?p=22708809"},"modified":"2023-05-23T06:58:26","modified_gmt":"2023-05-23T13:58:26","slug":"gothenburg-sweden-used-open-source-iot-to-drastically-cut-water-waste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenewstack.io\/gothenburg-sweden-used-open-source-iot-to-drastically-cut-water-waste\/","title":{"rendered":"Gothenburg, Sweden Used Open Source IoT to Drastically Cut Water Waste"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With around 500,000 residents in town, and over a million in its metropolitan area, Gothenburg, Sweden has plenty of people and ground to support. Like any city, there are services that need to be offered, and systems that need to be maintained over time. And it’s always easier to instrument things and monitor them from somewhere else than it is to drive out and check on pipes, lamps and streetlights in person.<\/p>\n

So the basic appeal of the Internet of Things (IoT) on the city level is to save time and gain efficiency by eliminating travel time and labor. That’s certainly what appealed to Hans Wendt, the project manager for the Gothenburg City Information Platform and IoT project. Wendt likes saving resources, and the city’s IoT<\/a> project even extends to saving water: If it rains, sensors tell city sprinkler systems to pause watering activities for some time period.<\/p>\n

But building out this system of sensors across multiple aspects of the city’s services wasn’t easy.<\/p>\n

“The market is building different siloed solutions for each company, making it expensive to manage. By building a common solution to manage the issue, [we] make it much easier,” he said.<\/p>\n

To build a solution to handle multiple IoT devices, platforms and problems, Gothenburg chose to build on top of Red Hat OpenShift. But first, it needed to build a proof of concept. And for that, it needed something to monitor and measure with sensors<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Wendt and Frederik Lehtonen, product owner for OpenShift at Gothenburg, chose bath water. After a proof of concept measuring bath water temperature coming out of people’s homes, they looked at other watering projects. And as a result, they’ve already cut water usage for managing 50,000 trees by 75%. They did this by connecting newly planted trees to sensors to monitor moisture levels and adjust watering.<\/p>\n\n

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