2008/12/08 - Meeting with Seattle Public Utilities
From Sustain
Attendees
From UW: Jon, Kate, James, Tim
From SPU: Ray and Al
Jon's Notes
CONSUMPTION
- The thing that tends to drive water consumption is the total size of the bill and even then, no awareness of consumption
- People not aware of standard water usage in the city or even peak water usage
- Suggests we look at betterbills.org, who is working on bill designs in seattle
- If SPU provided more frequent billing, customers would have more feedback
- The average Seattle home uses less than national average already. $23 is average bill in winter, $28 in summer
- As a result, basic supply and demand: the less units you sell, higher costs. Seattle has some of the most expensive water in the country
- In Seattle, you pay for consumption (some cities, price is not tied to consumption).
- In some municipalities, water bills are subsidized by local or federal government
- In Chicago and Vancouver, BC, water is embedded in property taxes
- Sewer is also very expensive in Seattle
- can see 40-50% increase in water usage during summer for some homes
METERS
- The meters in Seattle are outside on a sidewalk. The meters are in CCM and not in gallons. Most people can't tell how much water they use per day. Unlike recycling, water usage is fairly invisible. With recycling, neighbors can see how much you throw away and recycle.
- Water meters in Seattle are not smart meters, they are just now looking at remote-read readers.
- SPU owns most meters (99.9% of them)--this is typical across nation. Sewer deduct meters are not always owned by city (often by private company).
- Some homes now have remote reading meters. Deployment is slow. Currently deploying to hard-to-read/hard-to-access meters. Pretty expensive
- San Francisco doing a two ear change up to remote readers. In Seattle, though, they have to deal with unions.
- In Australia, putting remote readers in garbage trucks
- There are a dozen sub-metering companies in Seattle for large apartment buildings so that landlords can provide more accurate bills to residents
- They put meter near hot water tank. These are for-profit businesses
SENSING
- Water sensing technology hasn't matured like it has for electricity and gas
- Sensors need to be really robust, meter pits can get flooded, there is freeze/thaw cycles
- Smart water sensors in home are in the range of $2,000-3,000 per home. Typically, then, these are more for commercial buildings
LEAKS
- About once every 20 years, people get substantial water leak
- Running toilet, flapper is hung up or deteriorated. This type of leak could go on for years without being detected.
- Can't always hear a leaky toilet, supposed to replace flapper every 2 or 3 years. Al thinks we could hear the acoustic signal from a leaky toilet. He thinks he could hear it with a stethoscope.
- Over 600 toilet flapper types, never standardized by plumbing industry
- Al working with plumbing industry @ national level to standardize flappers
WATER SOURCES
- Snow is like money in the bank, you know you got it.
- With climate change, snow not as reliable and it's hard to predict weather patterns for rain
- Australia is in 6th year of drought, They are focused on building desalination and water reclaim.
- Takes about 20 years to develop new source of water
- In some parts of the city, SPU has rights to rain water
- Gates Foundation built 1.3 million gallon tank to gather rain water for toilet system
- Average roof sheds about 20,000 gallons of water a year. Ray has a 1500 gallon tank to collect this.
OWNERSHIP
- Seattle owns all water distribution channels in city
- City also tends to own sidewalk tile where meter is
- Homeowner owns pipe under property, city takes care of all pipes up to that juncture
- If the pipe underneath your property blows (which is your responsibility), you might not know for 60 days (until end of next billing cycle). As a result, SPU is often very forgiving in these situations.
- Citizens can work on the pipes they own but there are some regulations (typically enforced by public health). Plumbing Code is owned by Health Department
CHALLENGES
- Biggest challenge for SPU is meeting peak demand in summer
- Another challenge is informing customers about their water usage. Ray thinks lots of stuff can be done with making bills more descriptive/helpful
- Most customers not showing strong interest in water reduction programs
WHY WOULD THEY BE INTERESTED IN WORKING WITH US?
- General policy: waste is not good
- Even though there aren't current water access issues, they want substantial cushion for unpredictable events
ACTION ITEMS
- Get water data from Al, send email.
- Think about low-cost sensing for leak detection
Tim's Notes
Billing
- With more information the homeowner is more likely to change something
- The challenge is to control the bill. So then, how do you control the level of billing.
- Seattle Public Utilities has been working with betterbills.org
Metering
- Meters don’t measure unit is terms of gallons, they measure in CCF, which is approximately 750 gallons of water.
- In terms of feedback and behavior change, garbage services have had a huge success just in their trash can sizes and how they send your neighbors a bad message
- Supply constraint mentioned.
- We have to look for solutions that don’t change the billing cycle.
- Puget Sound energy example: a sensor reads electricity every 15 seconds and creates a home profile. The sensor also has ports for water meters.
- Indoor water sensors don’t have to deal with freezing temperatures but miss irrigation pipes.
- Average customer bill is about $23 per month.
Big Shifts and Climate Change
- SPU has no need for huge need for new facilities
- Climate change models change the level of snowpack and started the rainfall at a different point in time
- Models also covered many geographic considerations.
- In terms of SPU reaction to low snowpack, they typically drain the reservoirs before the snow starts to melt. Instead, they just keep the water levels high until summer.
- Incentives, waste is not a good thing. Kind of bad that, because Seatte-ites use less water the completely unsubsidized SPU has to charge more per CCf of water to cover their fixed costs.
- On-site waste water is a new grand idea but the wastewater space has not gone through many real shifts.
- Transformative technologies haven’t yet made it into the public because city rebuild themselves at a rate of 1% per year.
- In built environments all technology must be focused on rebuilding systems.
- SPU’s goal from 2010 to 2030 is 15 mgd
- Less units sold means higher cost per unit
Water Data
- Water data is not stored as a database, it is only used for billing
- We would need recent data . School of landscape architecture has some data.
- SPU policy, “the more you use, the more you pay”
Information Regarding Study
- About 10% of customers have leaks they don’t even know about. As Hoffman says, “Make the invisible, visible”
- How would the study work? We would have to use their end flow meters in a utility around the country conducting research.
- Look 3-years in advance to the time we have a product ready for testing.
- Mercer Island man is patenting a showerhead meter that alerts you when you’ve showered for too long. $35
- Automatic meter reading: SPU is experimenting with several automatic meter readers.
- Irrigation takes about 40-50% percent of summer water flow.
- Most people will not irrigate if their neighbor doesn’t irrigate.
- Las Vegas has a great program, they pay 1 (now 2) dollars per square foot of lawn that you remove because it costs them more to supply the water to keep the grass alive.
- Do we own the water at our own house? SPU has rain water rights is some areas, depending on size of rain water entrapment.
- The roof sheds about 20,000 gallons of water per year.
- High rise metering presents an interesting problem. Most buildings have a master meter that gets billed to the landlord and the landlord divides the bill among the tenants.
- Prorating is where the landlord bases the water bill not on flow (because they don’t have flow for each apartment) but on some arbitrary number like square footage.
- Now, landlords have to tell renters how they are going to pro rate homes
- There are about a dozen sub-metering companies in the Seattle area.
Leaks
- Percentage of leaks: average homeowner experiences a serious leak once in 20 years. Many people will have leaky toilets for years.
- People don’t hear low level leaks. Toilets needs their flappers replaced just about every 3 years.
- An audio sensor can easily hear leaks.
