Success story: automated NWRB water reporting for a deep well at a factory south of Manila

A manufacturing facility south of Metro Manila draws its process and sanitation water from a permitted deep well. Like every water permit holder in the country, it has to account for how much it extracts and submit those figures to the National Water Resources Board (NWRB). Until this year, that meant someone walking out to the wellhead, photographing the mechanical meter, copying the number into a spreadsheet, and hoping nothing was missed before the reporting deadline.

The problem

• Manual meter readings taken at irregular intervals, with transcription errors and missed days
• No visibility into daily extraction patterns — only a single monthly total
• Leaks, pump faults and abnormal night-time consumption went unnoticed for weeks
• Preparing NWRB submissions took hours of manual spreadsheet work every reporting period
• The wellhead is far from the office building, with no reliable Wi-Fi or power for networking gear

What Cubicore deployed

We fitted the existing flow meter with a LoRaWAN pulse/telemetry node and installed a Cubicore gateway at the plant so readings travel from the wellhead to the network without trenching cable or extending Wi-Fi. The site runs on the AS923-3 frequency plan used in the Philippines, within the 915–918 MHz unlicensed band covered by NTC Memorandum Circular No. 03-08-2013.

• Battery-powered LoRaWAN telemetry node on the existing deep well flow meter — no rewiring of the meter itself
• Cubicore LoRaWAN gateway covering the wellhead and the wider plant compound, leaving headroom for future sensors
• Readings forwarded into the Cubicore.Cloud platform over the plant's existing internet connection
• Battery-health monitoring so the maintenance team is warned long before a node goes silent

The custom Cubicore.Cloud dashboard

Rather than hand the client a generic sensor feed, we built a dedicated NWRB water monitoring dashboard on the Cubicore.Cloud platform, shaped around the way the plant actually reports. It shows total flow consumption in cubic metres with daily and monthly views, a year selector for historical comparison, the meter read at any chosen point in time, and the battery status of each well node — all in one screen anyone on site can read without training.

• Daily and monthly total flow consumption in m³, charted per well
• Year selector for comparing extraction across reporting periods
• Meter read lookup for reconciling telemetry against the physical meter
• Per-node battery status with last-update timestamp
• One-click CSV and PDF export formatted for NWRB submission

Results

• NWRB reports are generated from live telemetry in minutes instead of hours of spreadsheet work
• Continuous daily records replace spot readings, so submissions are complete and defensible
• Abnormal consumption — overnight flow, suspected leaks, pump issues — is visible the next morning rather than the next month
• No staff time spent walking to the wellhead to read a meter
• The same gateway is ready to carry additional wells, tanks and utility meters as the plant expands monitoring

Where this applies

Any water permit holder in the Philippines with the same obligation can use this pattern: manufacturing plants, water districts, subdivisions, resorts, agricultural estates and bottling operations. The approach also extends naturally to water level, pressure, tank volume and energy metering on the same LoRaWAN network.

If you operate a deep well and want extraction reporting handled automatically, email info@cubicore.io with your site location and the meters you need covered, and we will come back with a coverage plan, a hardware list, and a dashboard proposal.