VVWD Offers Tool For Monitoring Water Usage

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

The Virgin Valley Water District is gradually rolling out a new system which can help its customers better monitor their household water usage. It could also help in the district’s ongoing emphasis on water conservation.

The district’s new Customer Portal system will allow Virgin Valley homeowners to carefully track the culinary water running through their meters. It provides a number of tools to see how much water was used and when. And it even provides graphs and charts for an easy analysis of the household’s water data.

The data is recorded by new Sensus iPERL meters currently being installed throughout the community. These meters gather water usage data hourly and transmit that data wirelessly to a central communication tower. The data is then made available to homeowners through the Customer Portal program, an app installed on a home computer, tablet or smart phone.

This is especially helpful in detecting a leak, said VVWD Conservation Specialist Natalie Anderson in an interview with The Progress last week.
“The meters have sensors that will pick up if there is a continuous flow,” said Anderson. “It has the capability to detect the continuous flow of even one gallon an hour. So if that happens over a period of time, the system would notify the customer of it.”

The district staff has been reaching out to people and offering this tool when they noticed something unusual at their property, Anderson said.
“Like if we have seen a continuous flow or that their use has been really high all of a sudden,” Anderson said. “It allows them to study things a bit and find the leak faster. And when they have fixed it, they know it right away.”

This tool can be especially helpful to people who go on vacation or leave their homes for long periods of time during the summer. Receiving the notifications that way can avoid an expensive major leak and possibly even prevent a catastrophe involving property damage inside the home, Anderson said.

The Customer Portal is also helpful for homeowners who just like to track their water usage carefully. It can provide graphs showing trends in water usage.
“You can literally watch your usage every hour,” Anderson said. “You can see exactly what time your landscape irrigation comes on. You can see how many gallons it uses each time. You can even pull up reports that compare water use in various time periods including billing cycle to billing cycle, year to year, day to day and more. Over the long run that can be helpful in general conservation efforts.”

The Customer Portal program is not yet available to all VVWD customers. But it is installed in most homes and is rolling out methodically to the rest. District staff have taken a neighborhood by neighborhood approach to installing the new Sensus meters.

Currently more than 7,800 of a total of 10,200 VVWD households are already equipped with these meters. But not everyone has signed up for the Customer Portal program.

Anderson said that it takes a little bit of know-how to do the initial set up of the Customer Portal. But she is willing to help customers through that process.
“There are a few complexities in setting up the parameters of the system so that you are not getting a lot of annoying notifications that you don’t want,” Anderson said.

That is why she has been working with customers getting them set up one at a time as they request the service.
“It usually involves me talking to the customer, talking about their usage, and then recommending what the settings should be in the system,” Anderson said.

VVWD customers interested in the Customer Portal system can contact the VVWD office now and make a request. If their new meter is already in place it is just a matter of setting up the program. If not, then they can be informed of when the program might be available to them.

“We are very excited to be able to offer this new technology to our customers,” said Anderson. “It really will be a game changer in leak detection and it is going to be critical to our conservation program.”