Hourly water usage readings from nearly 75,000 Arlington homes and businesses are now available online through the city’s water account portal, Know Your H2O. The addition of hourly usage data to the Arlington Water Utilities website is another step in the City of Arlington’s efforts to give residents the tools they need to manage their own water usage and avoid billing surprises.
The City began providing access to daily water use readings for remotely read meters on its Know Your H2O website in 2018. Since then, other features have been added, including an option for account holders to set up high usage and high bill alerts and a proactive continuous usage alerts for residents. To access hourly readings, Arlington Water Utilities customers with remotely read meters should go to the tab labeled “Remote Read Meter” and double-click on the day that they want to explore. Hourly readings are updated in the Know Your H2O website twice a day.
As temperatures soared in August, Arlington’s demand for water reached a daily average of 79.6 million gallons. That number was up from an average of 69.8 million gallons a day in July. Most ZIP codes in the City also saw water usage increases of at least 10 percent in August 2020 when compared to August 2019.
In addition to helping residents see how much water they are using with daily activities, viewing hourly readings can reveal reasons for an unexpectedly high city services bill. For example, an automatic sprinkler system programmed incorrectly can waste thousands of gallons of water a week by going off overnight or in the middle of the day when no one is home. Continuous water usage each hour of the day over several days can also be spotted with hourly readings. Such usage is unusual and could indicate a plumbing leak or faulty toilet running nonstop.
Over the past seven years, remote read meters have been installed throughout Arlington as part of the City's Advanced Metering Infrastructure, or AMI, program. These meters are the same style and accuracy used in the water industry for years. The change is that the new meters are remotely read. Instead of a meter reader visiting homes, the AMI system transmits readings over a secure radio network. About 9,000 new remote read meters are installed each year.
For more information on managing your bill, visit the City’s account information website at www.ArlingtonTX.gov/KnowYourH2O. To learn more about water conservation, visit www.SaveArlingtonWater.com.
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