Prepaid Smart Water Metering (Agua Prepago)
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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Water is bought in advance and drawn with a proximity card held to a meter in the home, which brings households in arrears back onto the network. Critics note the other side: supply stops the moment the balance does.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 9 more in Medellín · 💧 Water guide · 📡 Data & IoT projects
EPM, Medellín's city-owned utility, sells water in advance through a proximity smart card read at a meter installed in the home, replacing monthly bills with pay-as-you-go balances. Launched commercially in 2015 after an 18-month pilot, it reached 30,538 connected households across Medellín by the end of 2024, still growing.
📊 Impact
EPM added 1,614 new prepaid-water households in 2024 alone (161% of its internal target), bringing the cumulative total to 30,538 in Medellín — the utility's own reported adoption figures, not an independently audited outcome measure.
🎓 Lesson
A prepaid smart meter can extend formal water access to households with payment arrears or informal connections, but critics argue it also means service stops the moment the balance runs out — a tradeoff the adoption numbers alone don't settle.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Prepaid Smart Water Metering (Agua Prepago)” — Medellín, Colombia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/medellin-agua-prepago/ (last verified 2026-07-30). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.