Talk of The Villages Florida - View Single Post - Water usage spikes - Way to diagnose the problem
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Old 06-15-2023, 09:45 AM
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Default Water usage spikes - Way to diagnose the problem

I have a separate water irrigation meter. Did some research into the high water usage issues many people seem to be having. I looked at my irrigation meter and saw it's a SENSUS SRII meter. This is an intelligent meter that saves a lot of usage logs. From the product description located at Positive Displacement Meters | SR II Water Meters | Sensus

The Sensus® Electronic Register+™ is an advanced electronic register with 120 days of hourly data logging with 30-day data pull intervals available. The Electronic Register+ has several available smart alarms so you can get alerts and address issues before they become more costly. These alarms include tampering, low battery, customer leak, reverse flow and high flow.

I highlighted about HOURLY readings being stored by the device. This is the key to figuring out what's happening.
If there is a sudden unexplained huge jump in monthly use, the meter can be queried to show exactly how much water was used every hour of every day for the month. From that information, it would be possible to analyze:
1. Continual consistent water use only at normal irrigation times (likely meaning the meter is reading properly, and no leaks)
2. A one time spike that triggered a single reading of thousands of gallons (a glitch that shows the meter is defective and that usage is not valid).
3. Continuous water flow (leak).
4. Water flow recorded randomly, when irrigation system is off (bad meter).
5. List of saved (or lack of any) internal alarms (clues to the cause of the problem).
6. Does the sum of hourly use history add up to the monthly total (bad meter if different).
7. Consistent usage that jumps to a different continual use (bad irrigation head, system piping leak).

If I can find this information, why has the villages not taken action to positively resolve this metering problem?
They could retrieve this data to diagnose problems with factual information. Show me this hourly data for any customer that thinks their bill is bogus, and I could probably narrow the reason in almost every case.