Athens-Clarke County residents have a new tool at their disposal to have keep track of their water use.
Laurie Lofton is the Water Conservation Coordinator for the Athens-Clarke County Public Utilities Department. She says the WaterSmart portal will allow customers to find out specific information regarding their water consumption.
“Through WaterSmart customers can track their hourly water use, they can receive suspected leak notifications, evaluate their water bill, find water savings tips and also compare their water use with households of similar size,” according to Lofton.
The department recently replaced all meters in Clarke County. The meters look the same, but operate very differently.
“Before we go out once a month and manually read meters. With this new AMI system, the data is collected and sent to us remotely and that data we push through to WaterSmart so that the customers have access to this data.”
Lofton said under the old system, it could take 30 days to notify customers about leaks.
Now data is received twice a day.
“We would manually read the meter, and if there was an increase in water use that looked like it could possibly be a leak, we would notify residents, but that was 30 days after the fact, so that leak could have been going on for quite some time and could have added a substantial amount to their bill.”
The office is open Saturday, August 3rd, from 9 to 12 with a customer appreciation event from 10:30 to 12:30.