Leak detective

Personally, when our water bill lands in my inbox I examine it closely, comparing our usage to both our “water target” and also to the same period in prior years. On the most recent bill it was clear that our household usage for July and August was higher than it should have been. Normally, we aim to keep our usage to about half the target. On this bill, though, our usage was just over three-quarters of that assigned goal.

Because everything inside the house appeared to be operating normally, and because we’d had no guests, my wife and I looked to our drip irrigation system as the likely source of the problem. Some investigating revealed that indeed it was: there was a crack in one of the main hoses (from which the smaller spaghetti tubes run to each plant), and the terminator on one of the spaghetti tubes had popped off (water is dispensed through narrow slits in the spaghetti tubing; terminating the tubing forces water through those slits).

The fixes were easy, but served as a reminder that irrigation systems — which often account for the lion’s share of water usage in a typical single-family home — occasionally break down, and thus need to be watched closely. In our case, not only had we been wasting water, the plants along the defective lines had suffered, since they hadn’t been receiving the correct amounts of water.

While your water bill can serve as a red flag to potential problems, if your home is equipped with a “smart” water meter, you may be able to take advantage of a much more powerful tool to help identify your water usage issues. Redwood City’s “My Water” website (mywater.redwoodcity.org; other cities likely have something similar) can show you your home’s water usage on an hourly basis. By examining the bar graph generated by the My Water website, I find I can easily pick out when we take our morning showers (and how much water we use), when we clean the kitchen and when we run the washing machine.

I can also clearly see when the irrigation system runs, and how much water it consumes. Thanks to the fact that our system runs twice a week during the early morning — before we are awake — the bar representing our irrigation system stands out quite clearly.

My Water shows that, prior to repairing our irrigation system, we were using about 239 gallons of water each time it ran. After fixing it, that number dropped significantly, to 135 gallons. Given that our system currently runs twice each week, that one repair now saves us about 200 gallons per week, or roughly 1,600 gallons per billing cycle. This translates to about two billing “units” (water is billed in units of one hundred cubic feet, or HCF; there are 748 gallons in a hundred cubic feet of water). Based on the rates shown on my most recent bill, I would have saved almost $16 had the leak not occurred.

Thanks to My Water and a bit of detective work, my wife and I should now be saving not only some actual money, but, more importantly, a fair amount of water. My Water works well for larger problems like ours, but if you are trying to identify a subtler problem, or don’t have access to the data produced by a smart water meter, allow me to suggest learning to read your own water meter. Reading your meter is easy, and by doing so you can pinpoint water usage to a finer degree — and in real time. For instance, by turning off all your taps, the meter can show if you are nevertheless still consuming water, indicating that you have a leak. Or, you can take readings before and after running a dishwasher, say, to learn how much water that appliance uses.

Conservation is our new watchword. While we should remain vigilant for ways to use less, first and foremost we should make sure that we aren’t wasting water unknowingly. To find out, all it takes is a simple bit of detective work.

Greg Wilson is the creator of Walking Redwood City, a blog inspired by his walks throughout Redwood City and adjacent communities. He can be reached at greg@walkingRedwoodCity.com. Follow Greg on Twitter @walkingRWC.