SciLights: One Spigot to Rule Them All
Last summer, I opened the water bill and my jaw dropped. Our water consumption had been bumping along at about 3,000 gallons per month for three people, and was stable for over a year. The bill I opened said we had used 7,000 gallons, and charged me with a scaling fee that places a higher premium on each additional thousand gallons. It was more than double what I was used to paying!
Of course, I went on a rampage, searching for a drippy faucet, putting food coloring in the toilet tanks to check for slow leaks, replacing one of the valve assemblies, and checking the water meter outside every night as if my life depended on it. Oddly, there were no big leaks, and no obvious changes in our consumption rate.
At that moment, I could’ve used the HydroSense monitor developed by the University of Washington Ubiquitous Computing Lab. It’s a device that can measure water consumption throughout the house from a single installation point, and it wirelessly communicates your water data back to the web.
How’s it work? Basically, every time you turn on a faucet or flush a toilet, a pressure wave propagates through your home plumbing system. The HydroSense, attached to an outdoor spigot or utility sink, can measure these waves and uses software to distinguish between a shower and a sprinkler. Cool!
In the end, my massive water “leak” was probably caused when the company my neighborhood hired to repaint our townhomes used MY outdoor spigot to feed their greedy pressure washers. Grrrrr. If I had a HydroSense, I could’ve caught them wet-handed!
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