A novel approach for estimating urban water end use characteristics of cities in the developing world

Abstract

The design of alternative urban water supply interventions for a community located in a low-income country requires detailed and precise knowledge of the nature, frequency and intensity of various characteristic water end-uses in the community. Without the availability of this characteristic water use information, high resolution metering experiments are the usually preferred methods to measure the water use volumes. However, in the developing world, these high resolution experiments are not an available option. Leaving the imprecise household interviewing process of data collection as the only option. This paper presents a novel methodology that improves and expands on the socially collected water uses data, through the use of a stochastic modelling process of the water use volumes to estimate the total monthly water use of the community. The methodology not only improves the estimates of water use volumes but also provides a mathematical modelling description of the household water uses in the community.