One of my recurring frustrations is around water bills. We moved to our home two years ago. In the first year, I simply treated our bill as a baseline. Then, as we went into year 2, I began digging deeper into trends to better understand why our bills are higher than what I’d expect.
After a few leak detection adventures, we found one leak. But the trends still seemed stubbornly high. That led us to a second leak that we fixed a couple weeks ago – this one was a major one. I got my bill for the past 8 weeks today, and it is still hard to tell if we made a dent. I * think * we did as I compare y/y trends and see the decline in the past two weeks. But I’m not certain and it’ll take another billing cycle or two before I know for sure.
Considering we’re talking about a critical natural resource, this feels horribly inefficient and I really wish we had better infrastructure and more transparency into what is going on.
Contrast this to electricity. We have a Powerwall from Tesla and solar panels from Enphase. It all connects beautifully on Tesla’s app. Every day, I know exactly how much energy was generated, how much I saved via my Powerwall, and how much we consumed.
I can have per-minute precision here – I know exactly how much we’re consuming at this moment. Over time, this has helped me understand how much energy my dishwasher or dryer consumes when they run, and we’ve continued to optimize our use so it doesn’t coincide with peak times.
We aren’t mega optimizers – but we’re optimized enough to make significantly better decisions. And, if Tesla went a step further, they have enough data about my consumption and trends to make recommendations for how we could better optimize our use and spend.
Real-time reporting is a big gift. I’m hoping we’ll see more of it.
