Being a little more clever with my smart meter would have saved me water and money

It was a Sunday evening and I was chatting with my neighbour in the front yard when I spotted it; the pool of water at the corner of my house.

It had been a dry week, and the pool of water was located just where I knew the main water line connected to my home. It had happened to my neighbour six months prior. He let me know as the two homes were built at the same time and he had discovered the quality of the pipe joiner installed was a little questionable.

So while I wasn’t surprised that a water leak had happened, I was interested in finding out why I hadn’t found out sooner. See, my home was among some of the earliest properties to have had a smart water meter installed as part of Orange City Council’s rollout of the new technology. Begun two years ago, the smart water metres are being progressively installed across the city over the next four to five years, although only around 1,000 are currently in place.

After being notified of having a smart meter installed in one of the early rollouts, I’d signed up to the MyH20 website and taken an interest in seeing just how much water we actually use in our home. Looking at the daily totals available online, I’ve found it interesting to note the peaks and troughs on certain days depending on the weather, garden watering days, days when we had guests and days when certain members of the household were away.

Since then, I’d only really glanced at the monthly water use report when it popped up in my inbox, but one of the benefits of having a smart meter was supposed to be that it could alert you to leaks via text message.

So why wasn’t my leak detected? Well, it turns out it was… but my account settings meant I just wasn’t told about it.

Searching my emails for the last monthly water use report, there at the bottom was a warning for a possible leak of approximately 37 Litres/hour (thankfully it had only occurred days before).

Looking into the customisable alert settings for my smart metre, I saw that the SMS alert threshold was set to 50 litres/hour, which was the default setting when I signed up, but it meant a lot more water would have been wasted before I would have received any text warning.

But it is a problem that new users shouldn’t face, according to Orange City Council’s works engineer (water and sewerage) Josh Barnes, who said new smart meter users will have the default leak detection threshold set at a much lower 10 litres/hour.

This can be set even lower and, from my own experience, it is definitely worth checking and familiarising yourself with these settings in order to get the most out of your meter — and avoid unnecessarily wasting water!

Besides being notified of potential leaks, for householders smart meters mean you can get a really good picture of your home water use and find ways to save, Josh said.

“It's quite good for people to look into how much water they might be using on certain days of the week and actually understand how much water they’re using for watering their garden,” he said.

“It's not an insignificant amount of water and it's good to understand that.”

If a leak does occur as it had in my situation, or even in the case of a running toilet, the smart metres also give you an idea of just how much water was being wasted.

“It's a good way for you to understand how much water that actually was during a period of time,” Josh said. 

Another feature of smart meters is that they allow you to compare your own home's water use to the average use of other households, although the small number of smart meters in the system means this data is less useful at the moment than it will be in the future.

The rollout of smart meters also means improved water savings from Council’s own infrastructure, Josh said, as comparing the water moving through their own system with how much water households are using, means they can detect leaking mains much earlier than ever before.

“At the moment we can only do that really on a three-monthly basis to coincide with the water meter readers,” Josh said.

“But with this new technology, with smart meters, we can look at doing that on a much more regular basis.

“And we can actually have alerts that tell us when there might be leaks in areas, so we can get on to them earlier… ultimately, it's all about maintaining our community resource.”

Orange City Council water meter replacement program is free for residents and is being progressively rolled out citywide over the next five years. The Council plans to install another 2,000 smart meters in the coming financial year.

When a smart meter is installed at your home, you will receive a letter from the Council to

inform you along with details of how to sign up for an online account on the MyH20 website where you can access your water use information.