WaterTech: high-precision smart metering

WaterTech is an Italian company founded in 1993. We were born with a specific mission:produce accurate and high-performance water metering instruments to enable Utilities to safeguard the water resource while ensuring maximum fairness and equity in transactions with end users.

Manufacturing around 1 million smart meters annually, we are one of the largest producers of water meters in Italy and Europe.

For more than 30 years, WaterTech has been manufacturing and selling metering systems for both water and gas as a leading smart metering company. These are not just “simple” products but rather complex remote metering systems for supply networks. The Water and Gas Smart Metering Systems made by WaterTech are technologically advanced, highly innovative, designed to undergo all the different regulations for the various specific uses, and totally adaptable to customers’ needs.

The company was born as a manufacturer of extremely accurate water meters and, since its early days, decided, against the trend with the rest of the market, to apply to water precision standards in measurement – until then – active only abroad. Thus, it became, by choice, a market reference in Italy for quality measurement systems.

Its customer service mission has led it to adopt an integral product certification system. An approach that combines with the innovative vocation that made WaterTech one of the first water meter manufacturers to equip them with measurement data collection and transmission systems, ushering in the era of the era of smart metering.

Already present in Italy for 30 years, WaterTech has taken on an international dimension since 2018 bybecoming part of ARAD Group, a multinational company of Israeli origin but active in all corners of the planet and a world water measurement leader.

This brilliant new partnership enables WaterTech to stand among the leading European manufacturers in the industry, focusing even more firmly on the company’s historic strengths: constant innovation and quality of products and services offered.

Following its entry into ARAD Group, it has targeted very firmly a trend that is transforming the world of water (and also gas) supply: the digitization of networks. Working closely with its Israeli parent company, WaterTech has developed a new generation of fully electronic smart meters based on the propagation effect of ultrasonic waves.

The highly advanced meters born from this technology – SONATA and OCTAVE – are the result of the combination of historically great Israeli efficiency and typical Italian innovativeness and boast measurement accuracy at the highest level, as well as native equipment of data collection and transmission systems and automatic alarms.

Today, WaterTech can count on a portfolio of products and services that is among the most comprehensive in the entire European and global landscape, unmatched in the market. In fact, in the water field, the product ranges offered include mechanical-traditional meters (turbine, volumetric, etc.) and electronic static meters (ultrasonic).

Furthermore, all major communication systems currently available can be combined with both types of meters: NB-IoT, LoRa WAN, 169 MHz, wMbus 868 MHz, etc… With such a wide range of choices, WaterTech is able to cover all measurement needs in the integrated water cycle.

Added to this wide-ranging proposal is the gas line. The latter, active since 2014, has been created with the same philosophy that characterizes the water one: maximum attention to quality, measurement accuracy, and innovativeness, leading WaterTech to excel in the gas measurement chain as well.

Since September 2024, WaterTech has further strengthened its growth trajectory with the inauguration of a new plant in Asti (Northern Italy), a state-of-the-art industrial facility covering almost 10,000 square meters, which places the company among the leading European industrial hubs in the smart metering sector.

The new production site allows for the strategic integration of all production lines in a single location, promoting high operational efficiency and optimized process control. Thanks to the extensive use of artificial intelligence, manufacturing activities are more streamlined, accurate, and flexible.

AI also enables advanced firmware customization and real-time data analysis, allowing WaterTech to offer advanced and reliable technological solutions for intelligent network management.

All assembly and calibration operations are done in Italy in WaterTech’s production facility, using some of the most sophisticated equipment on the European and world markets. This allows the products to provide excellent value for money.

The two product lines (water and gas), although different and each distinguished by its own identity (resulting in underlying know-how), are not without points of contact. WaterTech has developed its entire range of products and services to maximize efficiency for the customer, envisaging strong synergies between water and gas for those utilities that distribute both resources (so-called multi-utilities).

Through sophisticated technologies, water smart meters can hook into the same digital network that gas smart meters rely on. The customer can then implement and manage an only one digital network to control both distribution services. This provides clear advantages.

The manufacture of water (and gas) meters is complemented by that of meters for specific applications and test benches.

WaterTech is not just a water meter manufacturer! It is a solution provider that supports utilities throughout the entire process of implementing a smart metering network.

From installing the meters in the field to creating the data communication network. From transporting the data to providing the DAQ (Data Acquisition System) and big data processing and management software.

All with adequate support and training to the customer. A system integrator that propels Italian distribution networks into the future.

In this way, the company offers a complete package of products and services to meet all needs in the field of measurement.

This unparalleled breadth of the range of offerings makes WaterTech the ideal partner for Italian distributors: we can help you choose the ideal solution from the countless available, customizing it for you and supporting you in optimizing network management.

We are convinced that there is no single winning system that is always preferable. Instead, we believe that different managers, with different histories, who manage deeply heterogeneous territories through networks having very different characteristics, need solutions that reflect these different backgrounds. Not one winning choice for all, but rather specific choices for each specific utility. It is the task of the solution provider to ensure that the distributor has a choice among all possible systems, solutions, and products to meet the peculiar and distinctive needs that specific customer has.

The two guiding principles that orient, like polar stars, WaterTech’s actions are ensuring the precision and reliability of systems. As mentioned, since its founding the company has decided to develop high-quality technologies, in contrast to a market that instead, even then, was (and still is) often linked to shoddy technologies.

The focus on precise, stable, and reliable metering is also emphasized in the company’s mission statement and is now even more heartfelt as a result of joining ARAD Group. It is well known that in Israel, the parent company’s homeland, water is an extremely valuable commodity as it is very scarce.

For more than 80 years, Arad, the absolute market leader in that market, has ensured that that resource is preserved, aiming for maximum efficiency and elimination of waste. Currently, Israel is the world’s leading country in optimal water cycle management. This extraordinary achievement has been made possible by the development of increasingly innovative and high-performance technologies.

To constantly innovate and produce solutions at the cutting-edge Arad Technologies was created. It is an in-house engineering company within the Group that employs more than 100 engineers working in the most sophisticated laboratories dedicated to measurement which WaterTech also uses.

The protection of water resources through the precise measurement of consumption and efficient digital management of networks acts as a common thread between Israel and Italy, between ARAD Group and WaterTech, both bounded by sound ethical principles.

In an increasingly modern and globalized world, companies are called upon to impose strict ethical and moral standards on themselves in order to leave a positive imprint on the spheres in which they operate.

For this very reason, WaterTech has always emphasized issues such as environmental protection, employee empowerment, green production processes, transparency, constant innovation, and the selection of equally ethical suppliers.

WaterTech is the only company in the Italian water smart metering market that combines enormous experience in water metering and an equally important drive toward innovation.

WaterTech is a historic meter manufacturer that, however, has evolved into a manufacturer of smart meters at the cutting edge of technology. This was made possible thanks to the fundamental contribution of ARAD.

WaterTech, at the same time, has also become a solution provider, able to offer complete solutions. Not only products but also systems and services, thus being able to act on the entire smart metering chain.

Choosing WaterTech means taking the innovativeness of ultra-modern Israeli technology, but without renouncing the history, tradition, experience, and reliability of a subject that for decades has been a pride of Made in Italy and has always supported Italian and European utilities in renewing and becoming more efficient every day.