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AMWUA Blog
BY: Warren Tenney

Fix A Leak Week: Time To Hunt Down Leaks That Are Draining Your Budget

Published Mar 20, 2017

Water leaks inside and outside the average American home waste up to 10,000 gallons of water a year. This drain on the country's drinking water supply is so critical that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's WaterSense Program dedicates a week each year to remind us to find and fix leaks. Fix A Leak Week is especially important to desert dwellers. A household may use as much as 70 percent of its drinking water outside. Keeping your landscape healthy and your pool full is one thing, but without regular maintenance irrigation and pool equipment are prone to wasteful leaks.

Outdoor leaks are not as obvious and annoying as a dripping faucet, which makes them more difficult to detect and easier to ignore. It takes little time and very little know-how to keep these leaks in check. Water efficiency professionals at AMWUA cities understand this and want to help.

1. Get help from AMWUA’s #SmartPig. Let the AMWUA #SmartPig be your guide to the valuable information at the Smart Home Water Guide website or in Spanish at the Guia Para Detectar Fugas  website. The guide shows homeowners how to find leaks inside and outside - and how even the least talented do-it-yourselfers can fix them. Water efficiency professionals from AMWUA cities developed this website and translated their experience, knowledge and methods into short and clearly illustrated lessons anyone can understand. Some outdoor leaks are obvious, such as water pooling around a sprinkler head. Leaks in pool equipment are tougher to spot. These leaks leave small wet spots that can evaporate quickly or white crusty mineral deposits that pool owners may not know indicate a leak. The guide is built for mobile devices so you can carry it around your home and yard on a phone or tablet. The guide allows you to check off steps as you complete your water-leak audit over the course of a day, a week or a month. The information in the website is also available as a free 24-page booklet in English and Spanish. Just call your city's water efficiency professional and ask. The Spanish language guide also is available online as a flip-book.

2. Talk with your landscaper about water. Your landscaper can help you find and fix leaks in your irrigation system and ensure it’s running as efficiently as possible. Let your landscaper know that saving water is important to you. More than twenty years ago, Arizona recognized that landscapers could help their customers save money and help cities save water. With that goal in mind, Tucson Water, AMWUA, the University of Arizona’s Cooperative Extension and industry partners launched Smartscape . It is a low-cost desert-landscape training program for professionals. Since then, Smartscape has added advanced training dedicated to installing and managing irrigation systems. Since 1994, more than 1,300 professionals have completed Smartscape training in Maricopa County. A list of Smartscape trained landscapers is available online .

3. Watch your water bill. If you have a spike in water usage that you can’t track down, call your city. But don’t be surprised if your city contacts you first. In some AMWUA cities, employees review individual water usage and billing data for all customers before sending out monthly bills. When employees discover a sudden spike in a monthly bill, they contact homeowners, send a postcard, or post a message to their water bill and offer help to find the source of the problem. Advances in water meter technology can now provide a city and a homeowner with valuable data that can help find a leak. When a spike in water usage is detected, an employee can download 96 days of water usage information – hour by hour – from the water meter in your front yard or back alley. This information is a valuable clue to what is causing the spike. The data may show a homeowner is suddenly using 2,000 gallons of water every other morning at 2:30 a.m. That indicates something on a timer, like an automated irrigation system set to water the yard. Perhaps a broken drip line is gushing instead of dripping. The data makes it easier for the homeowner and city employee to work together to find the leak.

New technology will eventually make it easier for homeowners to detect leaks on their own. Imagine watching your water consumption online in real time. The new water meter reading system is known as "advanced meter infrastructure" or AMI. While some cities are piloting AMI systems, the City of Tempe is pursuing the most ambitious meter conversion in the Valley. All Tempe water customers will have access to their water use online by early 2019. The AMI system helps to alert you sooner to a change in your water use. Being able to see patterns in your hourly water use gives you a better opportunity to pinpoint a leak and know where to investigate.

While technology is helping to find leaks, it still requires us to take action to fix them. Valley weather is always beautiful during Fix a Leak Week. It’s a perfect time to turn on your irrigation system and pool equipment and learn to find and fix leaks that are draining your budget and our drinking water supplies.

AMWUA is a long-standing WaterSense Partner and an active participant in the annual Fix a Leak Week campaign.  This year, we are pleased to host the annual #FixaLeak Week Twitter party as @FixaLeakWeekAZ on Monday, March 20, at 2 p.m. Eastern.

For 48 years, Arizona Municipal Water Users Association has worked to protect our member cities’ ability to provide assured, safe and sustainable water supplies to their communities. For more water information visit www.amwua.org .

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