Solving the Missing Link: Wireless Sensors and Building-Wide Water Leak Detection

Wireless sensors are an early-warning system that can catch water leaks before damage escalates. But if there aren’t good internet connections in hallways or other building hubs where the sensors should go, you have to find a way to rewire.

Jerry Kestenbaum, Founder, Aware Buildings,
as told to Habitat

Sensor technology is one way to catch leaks before they do a lot of damage. Apartment owners can buy their own leak detectors, but does the technology exist to create a building-wide solution? 

Changes in wireless technology, batteries and other physics-related components have made it possible to deploy anywhere up to 2,000 sensors without having to spend millions of dollars. But there are challenges. Sensors can send out wireless signals anywhere between 30 to 500 feet, which have to be picked up and relayed to a database over the internet, which collects the data and sends out alerts. But New York buildings have a lot of metal in their walls, which makes it hard to pick up those signals. The other issue is that most buildings don’t have internet connections in their hallways, electrical closets or other hubs where you would put sensors. And if your building is old, the cost of bringing in wires and cords and drilling could be a challenge. 

You ran into this problem at a co-op on the East Side. What happened there?

This is a 17-story, two-building co-op that had very poor cellular service, so you couldn’t deploy sensors in the common areas. There was no easy way to install new cable in the building because it had no centralized electrical closet. And for aesthetic reasons, the co-op was not going to entertain running something on the outside of the building. Fortunately, one of the shareholders, who works for Siemens and is kind of a wireless guru, came up with the idea to build a Wi-Fi mesh network that would act as a spine for the building. It would bring the internet from a router on the first floor to one right above on the third floor, from the third to the fifth, and so on. The signals do have to run through concrete, but it’s just a 20-foot hop. We were able to set up a network across 16 floors with those rabbit-ear wireless routers that worked well enough to provide internet access for basic sensors, devices, controls and communications. We were really excited by this. But his solution was not so simple, and we are now trying to figure out how to make it more simple with a pre-configured internet protocol.

If you weren’t using wireless technology, what would be the problem with just drilling a hole and running the cable up a stairwell or common area?

Well, depending on the building, people often get quotes for between $30,000 and $100,000 just to drill across 15 floors. So a board might only want to do a building-wide sensor program if it is suffering lots of leaks and having difficulties with insurance damage claims. Five years ago, people would say: “Is the insurance company going to pay for leak sensors? Is it going to give me a discount?” And in fact, companies were giving people free sensors. But that was really for single-family homes, where you can shut off the water when you’re away. Carriers have gotten really, really tired of the unpredictability of water leak damage. You could have a building that has no damage and all of a sudden has a $1 million claim one year. And then you have buildings with claims every single year, especially in New York, where many buildings have four or five leaks every single summer just from condensation risers. As a result, insurance companies are raising deductibles and also dropping buildings with predictable and unpredictable claims. People are really feeling the pressure to address their water leak exposure.