Park Astra is a 10-tower residential society in Pune. Each tower has three overhead water tanks serving drinking water, domestic water and STP recycled water, creating a network of 30 overhead tanks across the property. Underground tanks are also part of the monitored water system.
Before continuous monitoring, water levels depended heavily on periodic manual checks. Tank levels were typically checked around three times a day. Those checks provided useful snapshots, but they could not show what happened between rounds or make a developing supply problem visible across multiple towers at once.
TownEve introduced contactless tank-level monitoring to give the operations team continuous visibility into the water network. The deployment uses top-mounted ultrasonic sensing, historical tank-level data and alerts so that abnormal behaviour can be investigated before residents experience an empty tank.
The operating problem
In a large residential society, an overhead tank losing water is not automatically evidence of excessive consumption. The cause may be a supply interruption, a transfer problem, a pump trip or normal demand occurring while replenishment has stopped.
With periodic manual checks, these situations can be difficult to distinguish quickly. A tank can appear healthy during one inspection and fall substantially before the next. Looking at one tank in isolation also provides limited information about whether the issue is local to a tower or affects the wider supply system.
Park Astra therefore needed more than a digital level indicator. It needed a historical view of how water was moving through multiple tanks over time.
How TownEve is deployed
TownEve uses contactless ultrasonic sensors mounted above the water rather than immersed in it. The system reports tank level, percentage and calculated volume where tank geometry supports the calculation.
At Park Astra, the monitored network includes the society's overhead and underground storage. Each of the 10 towers has three OHTs:
- Drinking water
- Domestic water
- STP recycled water
The monitoring system records historical readings at approximately 30-second intervals. This creates a time series that can be reviewed when an alert or operational question arises.
The wider TownEve architecture is designed around tower-level slave modules communicating over radio frequency with a society-level master module. The master module sends the aggregated data to the TownEve application over the internet.
What changed operationally
The important change was not simply replacing a manual reading with a remote reading. Continuous history made the direction and rate of change visible.
Instead of asking only, “What is the tank level now?”, the team could also see whether a tank was filling or depleting, how quickly its level was changing, whether the pattern was isolated to one tower, whether similar depletion was occurring across multiple towers, and how the pattern developed before an operational incident.
How falling tank levels exposed a supply problem
On two occasions, the monitoring system helped the team identify a developing water-supply interruption before the affected overhead tanks ran dry.
First, an email alert indicated that tank levels required attention. The team opened the TownEve application and reviewed the historical data rather than relying only on the current reading.
The charts showed levels declining steadily over time. More importantly, the same type of decline was visible across multiple towers. A simultaneous, sustained decline across several towers was a strong operational signal that the problem was unlikely to be ordinary consumption in a single tower.
The team investigated the water-transfer system and found that the pumping sequence had been interrupted. The pumps were restarted before the overhead tanks emptied.
Tank-level behaviour and historical context gave the team the evidence needed to investigate the supply system and restore replenishment before the monitored tanks emptied. TownEve is now extending this same water-intelligence layer with direct pump-state monitoring and remote or automatic pump control.
Why history mattered
A low-level alert by itself answers a narrow question: a tank has crossed a threshold. Historical data answers a more useful operational question: how did it get there?
At Park Astra, the downward trend across multiple towers provided context that a single point-in-time reading could not. It allowed the team to distinguish a broader replenishment problem from an isolated tower-level demand event and investigate accordingly.
Monitoring drinking, domestic and recycled-water storage together
Across the 10 towers, drinking water, domestic water and STP recycled water are stored separately. Monitoring these systems in one application gives the operations team a broader view of the society's water position without treating each tank as an isolated device.
Underground and overhead monitoring also helps connect source storage with tower storage. A falling OHT can have very different implications depending on what is happening upstream.
Contactless sensing
TownEve's sensors are mounted above the water surface. They do not need to remain immersed in the stored water. The standard sensing range used by TownEve is up to approximately 4.5 metres, subject to tank geometry and installation conditions.
Validation before wider deployment
The sensing and monitoring system at Park Astra was tested and validated over approximately three to four months before the broader deployment.
The rollout began with domestic-water monitoring and expanded after the team had observed the system over an extended period. Drinking-water OHTs, STP recycled-water OHTs and underground tanks were subsequently incorporated into the deployment following testing.
From manual rounds to continuous visibility
Continuous monitoring complements physical verification and maintenance by giving the operations team visibility between inspection rounds. Instead of depending on three daily snapshots to understand the day, the team can review how tank levels changed over time and investigate developing conditions as they emerge.
What the Park Astra deployment demonstrates
- Multi-tank context matters. A pattern across several towers can reveal something that a single tank cannot.
- Historical trends can be more informative than a live level alone.
- Alerts are most useful when they lead to evidence that an operator can investigate.
- Underground and overhead storage should be understood as parts of the same water network.
- Contactless sensing can provide continuous visibility without immersing the sensing element in the stored water.
- The monitoring data creates a foundation for the next operating layer. TownEve is developing direct pump-state monitoring and control so the same water-intelligence layer can support increasingly automated response.
The next step for other societies
Every society has a different combination of underground tanks, overhead tanks, water sources, transfer pumps and operating practices. A useful starting point is therefore a map of the water network: which tanks exist, what each tank stores, how water moves between them, which failures matter operationally and who needs visibility.
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