Aqueduct for manufacturing campuses
Aqueduct meters water, electricity, steam, compressed air, cooling and effluent across every unit on a campus, reconciles them into balances that have to add up, and turns the largest unmanaged variable in the plant into a managed one.
Short answer
On a large, unmetered manufacturing campus, up to 40 percent of water supply can sit as unaccounted loss, compressed air leaks routinely waste 20 to 40 percent of generated air, and failed steam traps can lose roughly 20 percent of the steam leaving the boiler. Aqueduct meters each utility non invasively, builds a balance that has to reconcile, and raises an alarm within about 60 seconds when it stops reconciling, rather than at the next billing cycle.
Milvian works with one of India's ten largest manufacturing campuses, roughly 500 contiguous acres running food, beverage, dairy and ghee, edible oil refining, herbal extraction, milling, personal care and packaging units side by side. Every unit metered its own bill. Nobody saw the campus as a single, comparable system. That gap is the same on a 500 acre park in Uttarakhand, a plant in Ohio and a factory in Dubai Industrial City.
On this page
The problem
Manufacturing measures everything that touches the product. Yield, throughput, downtime, reject rate, moisture, weight, all to several decimal places, in real time, with an owner for each. Then the utilities that make production possible arrive as one number on a monthly bill, with no visibility into which line, which shift or which process spent it.
01
Leaks, tank overflows, idle draw and hoses left running accumulate quietly across a large site. Until a campus is metered, as much as 40 percent of supply can sit as unaccounted loss, and the term does not appear on any report because nobody is calculating a balance.
What it costsPaid at the intake, treated at the ETP, and counted against you in the disclosure. Three costs, one loss.
02
Compressed air systems typically consume 10 to 30 percent of a plant's total electricity. Avoidable leaks frequently waste 20 to 40 percent of generated air, and in poorly maintained facilities losses can reach 50 percent of compressor capacity. A leak makes a noise that a factory floor swallows completely.
What it costsYou run a compressor continuously to pressurise the atmosphere through a hole nobody can hear.
03
Without a preventive maintenance programme, approximately 20 percent of steam leaving the boiler plant can be lost through leaking traps, distribution losses waste 10 to 20 percent more, and steam and condensate leaks can account for as much as 19 percent of overall plant energy consumption.
What it costsEvery litre of condensate not returned is paid for again in water, in chemicals and in fuel.
04
Feeder level load, power factor and demand spikes are invisible until the utility invoice arrives. By then the peak that set the demand charge happened weeks ago and cannot be investigated, let alone prevented.
What it costsA penalty charged monthly for a condition that could be corrected once.
05
STP output, RO reject, cooling blowdown and boiler condensate are all recoverable, and all are commonly reported as reuse without a meter behind the number. RO recovery typically runs 50 to 75 percent, which means a quarter to half the feed leaves as reject, usually to drain.
What it costsAn unverifiable reuse figure fails at the first assurance question and wastes the recoverable volume in the meantime.
06
On a multi unit campus the highest value question is which unit is efficient and which is not, normalised per tonne or per litre of output. Without sub metering, a small intense plant hides comfortably behind a large one and the efficient unit gets no credit.
What it costsCapital goes to the loudest unit rather than the one with the worst intensity.
Every utility, mapped
| Utility | Where it goes | The usual failure | What Aqueduct meters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Process and service water | Product make up, washing, cooling, general service | Up to 40 percent unaccounted loss before metering | Intake by source, per unit and per line flow, with unaccounted loss as an explicit balance term |
| Electricity distribution | Incomers, transformers, feeders, motor control centres | Power factor penalties and demand peaks discovered on the invoice | Feeder level load, power factor, peak demand, transformer and distribution loss estimates |
| Steam and boiler fuel | Process heating, drying, evaporation, cleaning | Around 20 percent lost to failed traps, condensate not returned, blowdown unmanaged | Fuel input, steam flow, condensate return ratio, feedwater make up, blowdown |
| Compressed air | Pneumatics, actuation, conveying, blow off | 10 to 30 percent of plant electricity, with 20 to 40 percent of it leaked | Compressor kW, flow, pressure, and off shift baseline demand as the leak signature |
| Cooling and chilled water | Process cooling, HVAC, refrigeration, cooling towers | Efficiency drift through fouling; make up and blowdown unmetered | Chiller and compressor power, delta T, kW per tonne, tower make up and blowdown |
| RO and water treatment | Boiler feed, process water, polishing | RO reject at 25 to 50 percent of feed sent to drain rather than recovered | Feed, permeate and reject flow, recovery percentage, fouling trend |
| Effluent, ETP and STP | Treatment, reuse loops, discharge | Shock loads with no attributable cause; reuse claimed but unmeasured | Discharge flow and load, reuse volume by end use, event correlation to the source that caused it |
| Solar and on site generation | Rooftop and ground mount PV, captive generation | Self consumption against export not optimised in real time | Generation, self use, export, avoided cost, carbon offset |
| Air quality and environment | Production halls, warehouses, offices, labs | Conditions assumed rather than logged, ventilation on fixed schedules | CO2, PM2.5, VOC, temperature and humidity per zone against ventilation energy |
Ranges are indicative and drawn from the published sources listed at the foot of this page. A site survey replaces them with your measured numbers.
Three markets, three clocks
United States
Cost, competitiveness programmes and customer driven disclosure.
Dubai and the UAE
A cooling dominated grid, manufactured water, and mandated demand reduction.
India
Assured disclosure, pollution board enforcement and a live carbon market.
The solution
Aqueduct is hardware agnostic by design. Any sensors, any protocols, any controls. It consumes the infrastructure that is already specified rather than displacing it, reading BACnet, Modbus, MQTT, OPC UA and vendor APIs into a single normalised asset model, and adds retrofit sensors only where a measurement genuinely does not exist.
Water
A live schematic that has to balance.
Energy
The same lens turned on power, heat and air.
Air
Environmental conditions where people actually work.
Intelligence
Agentic AI, not another dashboard.
Deployment
Not 500 acres on day one. One self contained, high intensity unit with a complete water and thermal story, instrumented end to end as a lighthouse the whole campus can see. Contained boundaries matter more than size: one supply, one discharge and one energy feed makes the first balance clean, and a clean first balance is what makes the second unit an easy decision.
Walk the pilot unit. Map meters, panels, taps, air lines, boilers, cooling and reuse loops. Wireless survey for gateway coverage. Pull 12 months of bills. Non invasive, and production never stops.
Sensor list, gateway layout and the water and energy balance model for your sign off.
Non intrusive flow, pressure, level and power sensors fitted. Data starts flowing zone by zone.
Digital twin live and reconciling. First leaks and losses named, quantified against the baseline.
| Phase | Scope | What it delivers |
|---|---|---|
| Quarter 1 | Lighthouse unit | One unit live end to end. Water digital twin, energy feeders, first verified savings. |
| Quarters 2 to 3 | Expand | The next highest intensity units join. Smart controls automate the largest loads. |
| Quarter 4 | One campus view | Every unit on one portfolio, ranked, benchmarked and reporting ready across the whole site. |
Proof
Manufacturing, India
Roughly 500 contiguous acres running food and beverage, dairy and ghee, edible oil refining, herbal and ayurveda extraction, flour and spice milling, personal care and packaging, plus boilers, cooling, STP and RO. Each unit metered its own bill and nobody saw the campus as one comparable system.
Dairy, Andhra Pradesh
Process water, CIP circuits, refrigeration load and boiler thermal balance instrumented as one system rather than four separate departments.
Dairy and ghee, North India
Ghee and butter lines carry the heaviest fat and effluent load in food processing. Metering the wash down and cleaning volumes behind that load turned an effluent problem into a measured process variable.
Global water stewardship
One real time water intelligence layer across the portfolio in support of a public water positive commitment, with same day leak and anomaly detection and auditable data for reduce, reuse and replenish reporting.
Aviation, United States
Roughly 5,000 meter points instrumented across a 24/7 campus. A 9,000 gallon per day anomaly surfaced within 72 hours of go live, a find manual reads would have missed for months.
The platform record
Hardware agnostic across 130 plus device types and any protocol. Enterprise grade and AWS native, as an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, with role based access and audit logging.
Client names are withheld where usage permission is still in progress. Reference calls can be arranged under NDA.
Outcomes
Leaks, idle draw, air losses and power factor penalties become named line items with an owner and a payback, rather than an unexplained variance.
STP output, RO reject, condensate and cooling blowdown quantified, so recovery targets are set against real volumes rather than design assumptions.
Bursts, overflows and demand spikes caught in about 60 seconds rather than next month, which changes both the cost and the response.
Plants compared on intensity per tonne or per litre, so the efficient unit is rewarded and capital goes where the intensity is worst.
Audit grade water and energy records for BRSR, GRI 303, CDP Water, ISO 50001, DOE programmes and pollution board disclosures, from one source of truth.
Automation and agents do the watching. The team acts on a ranked list of what matters instead of reading trends.
Questions
On a large campus that has not been metered, as much as 40 percent of supply can sit as unaccounted loss across leaks, tank overflows, idle draw and equipment left running. The figure is an indicative range from comparable multi plant deployments rather than a universal constant.
The point is not the number itself. It is that the loss term is not calculated at all in most plants, so whatever the real figure is, nobody knows it and nobody is chasing it.
Compressed air systems typically consume 10 to 30 percent of a plant's total electricity, and avoidable leaks frequently waste 20 to 40 percent of the air generated. In well maintained systems leakage should be below 10 percent, while poorly maintained systems can lose 20 to 30 percent of air capacity and power, and untreated facilities can reach as high as 50 percent of compressor production capacity.
The most reliable detection method is off shift baseline demand. Any air being consumed when no production is running is leaking.
A dashboard displays readings. A digital twin models the plant as a system of relationships that must hold: supply equals the sum of consumption plus unaccounted loss, boiler output equals steam delivered plus losses, and so on.
The difference matters operationally. A dashboard requires someone to notice a number is wrong. A twin fails to reconcile, which is an event in itself, and covers loss modes nobody thought to write a threshold for.
No. Instrumentation is non invasive by design: clamp on ultrasonic flow meters, current transformers, surface temperature sensors and existing meter and PLC integration over standard industrial protocols.
Any work requiring a line break, such as an inline meter where clamp on measurement is not viable, is scheduled into a planned shutdown. The survey itself never interrupts production.
Aqueduct is hardware agnostic and supports more than 130 device types across any protocol, reading BACnet, Modbus, MQTT, OPC UA and vendor APIs into one normalised asset model. Existing instrumentation is consumed rather than displaced.
On the output side, agents can issue work orders into CAFM, CMMS and ERP systems, so a detected fault becomes a scheduled job rather than an alert someone has to read and re enter.
First live data typically lands 2 to 6 weeks from the first call. Anomalies usually follow within days of that. At a top 25 US airport campus, Aqueduct surfaced a 9,000 gallon per day anomaly within 72 hours of go live.
A defensible before and after against 12 months of historic bills takes about a quarter, because it needs to cover a representative production cycle.
The one with the most complete utility story under one roof: heavy process water, cleaning and wash down, a thermal load, and its own electrical feed, with clear physical boundaries.
Contained boundaries matter more than size. One supply, one discharge and one energy feed makes the first balance clean, and a clean first balance is what earns the second unit.
Water and energy records are exported at line level with timestamps for BRSR and BRSR Core in India, GRI 303, CDP Water, ISO 50001 energy performance indicators, DOE Better Plants reporting in the United States, state pollution control board returns, and internal ESG or water positive programmes.
Because the underlying data is continuous and metered, it stands up to reasonable assurance in a way that reconstructed spreadsheet allocation does not.
Aqueduct is enterprise grade and AWS native, built as an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, with SOC 2 aligned security, role based access control and audit logging.
Architecturally it is designed to sit on the monitoring side rather than in the control path, and where OT connectivity is required it uses secure, segmented access into plant networks.
References
Third party benchmarks are linked below. Milvian figures (175+ facilities, 19 countries, 130+ device types, 2 to 6 weeks to live data, 88 facilities and 75,000 m3 saved, 5,000 meter points and the 9,000 gallon per day find) are our own deployment records.
Field notes
Seven research notes on where a manufacturing campus loses water, power and heat, what the reporting regimes in India, the United States and the Gulf now require, and how a utility digital twin makes losses self evident.
Water loss
Until a large campus is metered, as much as 40 percent of supply can sit as unaccounted loss. The number is not the point. The point is that almost nobody calculates the term at all.
8 min read
Leaks
Compressed air is 10 to 30 percent of plant electricity and leaks waste 20 to 40 percent of it. Failed steam traps can lose 20 percent of boiler output. Neither failure ever trips anything.
9 min read
Electricity
Two of the largest components of an industrial electricity bill are decided by conditions that last minutes and are invisible for weeks. Feeder level metering is what makes them manageable.
8 min read
Effluent and reuse
RO recovery typically runs 50 to 75 percent, which means a quarter to a half of the feed leaves as reject. Cooling blowdown is recoverable at 75 to 90 percent. Most of it goes to drain because nobody meters it.
8 min read
India compliance
BRSR Core disclosures carry independent reasonable assurance. CCTS is absorbing PAT with compliance obligations already live. Both run on the same underlying measurement, and most plants maintain three versions of it.
9 min read
Platform
Threshold alarms catch the failure someone anticipated. A balance catches every failure that changes the total, including the ones nobody thought to write a rule for.
7 min read
Three markets
A multinational manufacturer runs one process and three reporting regimes. The engineering is identical everywhere. The evidence each market demands is not.
8 min read
Next step
Pick a self contained, high intensity unit with a complete water and thermal story. We instrument it end to end as a lighthouse the rest of the site can see, and the numbers are yours either way.