Johannesburg Water: Pressure Control and Night-Flow Telemetry Against 46% Losses

Johannesburg Water, a municipal entity of the City of Johannesburg, distributes water it buys in bulk from Rand Water, the regional board fed by the Lesotho Highlands transfer. Its own 2023/24 annual report put non-revenue water at 46.2 percent, roughly half of that physical leakage. Against that, the utility is retrofitting a measurement layer. By July 2026 it had commissioned 53 smart pressure controllers with 306 more being installed, fitted 225 acoustic noise loggers on critical pipelines, and begun retrofitting smart hydraulic flow controls on 28 high-consumption reservoirs and towers. These act rather than merely report: they throttle reservoir outlets automatically at night to cut minimum night flow losses and rebuild storage before morning. A 24-hour telemetry system with two staffed control rooms watches reservoirs and pump stations. The instrumentation is arriving into a decline rather than reversing one. The Auditor-General found losses above the national 30 percent norm for four straight years and notified the city of a material irregularity in December 2024. When taps ran dry across Johannesburg in 2024 and 2025, both layers were implicated: Rand Water restricted bulk volumes to protect its own storage, while the city's reservoirs could not refill overnight.

✔ Reviewed by the 1001 Smart Cities editorial desk · 🔎 Last verified 2026-07-26

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