Monitoring Water Usage and Cost

Those who keep water usage and cost at minimal levels routinely monitor usage by analyzing municipal supplier bills, routinely take independent reads of the municipal supplier’s primary meter(s) and analyze current water consumption. When billed or current usage is higher than expected, action takes place to verify and solve the problem. Taking your own independent reads of the supplier primary meter provides key benefits:

• Minimizes lag time between a major leak occurring, and you finding out. If you rely on the municipal supplier’s bill for all your analysis, it may be 60 to 90 days between the start of a major problem, and their bill getting into your hands. That’s 60 to 90 days of high cost you will be paying out. Eliminate this by taking weekly reads of your primaries!
• Allows you to verify the supplier’s bill as accurate. Compare your independent meter reads with the reads on the supplier bills: do they make sense? When a primary bill spikes up, it's not always because of a water leak. Most of the time, it is due to a meter read or data entry error.

While this may seem like a lot of work, it actually takes very little to operate a monitoring program once it is set up. And this is not rocket science, set up is easy! Good property managers and maintenance personnel should be able to quote their average and current usage numbers at any time. Let’s take a look at Standard Expected Primary Water Usage, and the gallons per day (gpd) benchmark. Benchmarking your usage is the first step, let’s get going!

What you will need:
Basic property data: address, number of units, approximate year of construction, etc.
Latest primary supplier bill(s), with the meter reads available Independent reads of the primary meter(s), if possible
Occupancy over the same period. 

Reading your primary meter

Once you have everything that you need, you can start tracking your usage.