The following article was published in The Daily Journal on November 25, 2023. The original content may be found here.
Count every drop
California’s drought may be over, for now, but I continue to scrutinize my water bill whenever it arrives, making sure I’m not wasting water. Normally those bills show that my household uses far less water than our assigned target. But a year ago last summer my wife and I returned from a trip to learn that a hose had been left running in our backyard. Fortunately, our gardeners had discovered it and shut it off, but not before the hose had run for something like two and a half days. When we returned, even though the hose had been shut off for some 48 hours, one of our sump pumps — which we’d had installed well before the drought, back when our main problem was too much rainwater, rather than too little — was running, even though we’d had no rain. Trying to be optimistic, I thought that perhaps the problem had originated from a neighbor, but no. It really was us inadvertently wasting water.
Redwood City sends out water bills bimonthly basis, but that isn’t how they read our meters. Years ago, Redwood City added transmitters to our water meters, thereby enabling the city to remotely gather hourly usage information from each. That detailed information was made available to interested households via the web, so that is where I turned to see just how much water we’d wasted. While there, I did something I should have done long before: I set an alert if excessive usage was detected. Such an alert would have enabled me to learn about the problem sooner, and I could have had someone check on things. Now, with the alert finally set, I manually checked our usage periodically for another couple of weeks, after which I began to relax and trust the system.
That trust paid off several months ago, when, just around midnight, an underground PVC pipe leading to our backyard suddenly cracked. It might have been due to a tree root, but whatever the real reason, water was suddenly leaking deep into the soil behind our house.
Although the water use alert wasn’t all that sensitive — it took about a day and a half before I was notified — upon receiving it my wife and I quickly discovered a good-sized puddle in the backyard where one shouldn’t have been (it hadn’t rained for weeks). Based on the puddle’s location we were confident that the problem was with our irrigation system, so we shut off the system’s master valve — which did the trick. Then it was just a non-trivial matter of digging up the pipe and repairing the break.
Until now I’ve referred to Redwood City’s water usage website in the past tense. That’s because a few couple of ago Redwood City shut down that system while, at the same time, announcing that it would soon be switching to a new one. As is often the case, “soon” stretched into a couple of months. Thankfully, though, the new system is finally up and running.
Redwood City’s new service — “Dropcountr” — comes from an outside firm and works a lot like the old. With it you can see your usage on a yearly, monthly, daily, or hourly basis, and you can set it to alert you if it thinks there’s a problem. But Dropcountr has some additional features I particularly like. For one, Dropcountr is not just a website: there is an app for your Android or iOS smartphone. For another, alerts can be sent as email messages, text messages, or as a push notification to the smartphone app. Plus, hovering over a month in the yearly view causes Dropcountr to compare that month’s usage with the same month from the previous year (Redwood City seems to have loaded Dropcountr with data beginning July 1, 2022).
Dropcountr is free, and, as I can personally attest, might save you a lot of trouble if you have a problem along the lines of what my wife and I did. Although you’ll still need to track down the actual source of the problem, an early warning system helps minimize the damage. Thus, I highly recommend that everyone who obtains their water from Redwood City go to redwoodcity.org/departments/public-works/water and create a free Dropcountr account. Then, in their website go to settings and ensure that the My Info and Site Profile sections are correctly filled out. Finally, explore the Notifications section and set those notifications that seem appropriate. And if you have a smartphone and would like to easily check your water usage from time to time, download the free Dropcountr app from the appropriate app store.
With Dropcountr and some thoughtful water management, not only can we do our part when next we are in a drought, when we are not we can at least ensure that we pay no more than necessary for our water.
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.