More information means residents can keep an eye on water consumption
Niskayuna’s new residential water meters are more accurate, leading some to complain about increases on their bills, but officials say the plus side is the meters also allow residents to keep a closer eye on water usage.
Some Niskayuna residents saw higher water bills than expected in the latest billing period, but the rate of $2.60 per 1,000 gallons wasn’t an increase. A water meter replacement project throughout the town now allows meters to be read from the street. Under the old billing system, residents had to mail in their water meter cards with their usage total or the town would estimate how much water was used. Town officials are saying that change in method and the particularly dry summer in 2010, are responsible for the increase some customers noticed.
In some instances, they were estimating their bill, and they had not read their meters in five, 10, 15, 20 years, said Councilwoman Denise Murphy McGraw. `Some of this is a surprise to folks, but it is not like they went down to read their meter every quarter or six months religiously, and it suddenly hit them.`
McGraw also noted some people are getting checks from the town because their bills had been overestimated, and they were due a refund. Around 200 people, or 3 percent, are getting refund from the town, said Richard Pollock, superintendent of the town Engineering Department.
The new meters are much more precise, measuring to the closest 1/100 of a gallon, said Pollock. The old meters measured to the closest 10 gallons.
`On one the best comments or biggest questions [Pollock] answers is a lot of people are asking for their old meters back,` said Landry. `We will not be doing that.`
With the new meters, people will be able to keep a much closer eye on their water consumption.
One the feature of the new meters is that there is a flag for high consumption, possibly leading to early detection of leaks that cause spikes in bills.
Residents can also find out a lot of information by just `waking up` their meter by shining a flashlight at the head of it. The digital display turns on and gives two flashing numbers, one is the actual reading in gallons and the other number shows how much water is flowing through the meter at the moment it is being looked at.
`If you have a faucet on upstairs, or someone taking a shower you will be able to see the actual flow rate going through there,` said Pollock. `If you are ready to go to bed you can go down there and look at the meter and it reads 0.00 for the gallons per minute then you know everything in that house is shut down. If you see some number in there then you know something, somewhere, there is still water flowing.`
There is also an icon that looks like an outdoor water spigot, said Pollock, and if the icon is on continuously then there is some sort of leakage occurring over the past 24 hours. If the icon is flashing then it means that it hasn’t been continuous, but is much more than normally expected. The meter analyzes every 15-minute interval in making that determination.
`If somebody has a question or a problem, we can actually go out there and each meter has a memory chip in it and it stores data for up to 30 days,` said Pollock. `We can download a month’s worth of data and look at it and see exactly what has happened over that month in a very precise fashion.`
He said a resident a month ago had a very high consumption and a high bill, so the town’s crew went to the house to look for leaks but couldn’t find one. When town workers asked if anything had changed lately the resident said they just had a new dishwasher put in 15 minutes before the workers arrived.
`We could see the flow in that was something like 160 gallons per hour going continuous in a straight line 15 minutes before our guys showed up and then it dropped down to zero,` said Pollock. `In that case, this dishwasher had water that was just continuously flowing through it even though it was shut down that was a lot of water.`
Some residents didn’t understand how they used as much water as they were billed for, but Pollock said out of 7,400 bills, there were only two accounts where a mistake was made in the billing.
When residents were calling up with questions initially, there was a problem with transferring calls from the Water and Sewer Garage to Town Hall, said Pollock.
`The calls that got transferred up, when we picked them up at Town Hall, they sounded like they were 10 miles away and we could barely hear them,` said Pollock. `We have worked on correcting that, and we didn’t get a perfect fix on that, but we got it tweaked the best we can.`
There are still some homes that need to have their old meters taken out, but the meter can only be changed if someone is at home when crews arrive.
`This was to be expected because these are the hard to get into houses,` said Landry.
Estimating a time frame for the completion is difficult, said Pollock, because of all the variables involved, such as a resident owning another home and only being around sporadically.
`The further down the list you go, the harder it is to get in,` said Pollock. `If people are around in the summer time and they are able to knock on people’s doors when they are home then maybe in a few months.“
