Smart Water Management in Gerjen

The Danube Region is home to thousands of small municipalities. For many of them, smart city solutions, data-driven management and advanced digital infrastructure may seem like something designed mainly for large urban centres.

The Hungarian village of Gerjen proves the opposite.

With just over 1,000 residents, Gerjen became a testing ground for a smart water monitoring solution developed by Genius Smart Group within the PilotInnCities project. The pilot demonstrated that when a motivated municipality meets the right technological partner, even a small community can test advanced solutions, generate useful data and achieve tangible results.

Turning water consumption into actionable insight

The pilot focused on one of the most practical challenges for local governments: managing water consumption across municipal facilities. Water leaks, abnormal usage patterns or technical malfunctions can easily remain unnoticed for weeks or months, leading to unnecessary costs and inefficient use of resources.

To address this, a LoRaWAN-based smart water monitoring system was introduced across several municipal sites in Gerjen, including the sports hall, sports field, municipal kitchen, municipal office, healthcare centre and local heritage house.

The system collects water consumption data in real time and evaluates it in 15-minute intervals using AI-supported analytical tools. When abnormal consumption is detected, the platform can trigger an immediate alert, helping the municipality react before the issue grows into a costly problem.

Results from the first measurement period

The impact became visible almost immediately.

Already during the first measurement period, the system identified several unusual consumption patterns. These included continuous abnormal water usage at the healthcare centre and the municipal office, indicating likely technical malfunctions requiring further investigation.

Without timely detection, such issues could easily translate into hundreds or even thousands of euros in unnecessary water bills. With smart monitoring in place, the municipality gains a practical tool for earlier intervention, better maintenance planning and more predictable utility management.

Why this matters for small municipalities

The Gerjen pilot is not only about water meters and dashboards. It shows how small municipalities can gradually build digital capacity without needing large-scale infrastructure from the start.

For local governments, the benefits are clear:

• better overview of water consumption across municipal buildings,

• faster identification of leaks and anomalies,

• reduced risk of unexpected utility costs,

• more efficient maintenance decisions,

• stronger basis for data-driven municipal management.

This is exactly where agile piloting creates value. Instead of discussing innovation only in theory, municipalities can test a concrete solution in real conditions, observe how it performs, collect feedback and decide on further steps based on evidence.

Water management as a growing smart city priority

The Gerjen pilot also confirms that water management is becoming an increasingly important part of smart city development. Similar objectives were pursued in the Czech Republic through the PilotInnCities agile pilot of nextdrop s.r.o. at Techmania Science Center in Pilsen, where smart monitoring and data-driven management were also used to improve water-related operations.

Together, these pilot cases create space for knowledge exchange between municipalities, technology providers and project partners across the Danube Region.

The Gerjen pilot was implemented with the support of the Hungarian PilotInnCities partners HROD Social Economy and Community Development Centre and Neumann Technology Platform, in cooperation with the Municipality of Gerjen.

Gerjen shows that innovation is not defined by the size of a municipality. It is defined by the willingness to test, learn and act on data.