It turns out water meters, relatably, start picking up on less of what’s going by them as they get older.
The North Salt Spring Waterworks District (NSSWD) is embarking upon a project to replace more than 1,800 meters in its system over the next three years, in part to address a potentially significant under-reporting of water, thanks to ever-aging devices that are now often 20 years past their expiration date.
And in a system as large as the North Salt Spring Waterworks District — which delivers well above 100 million gallons to homes and businesses each year, from Southey Point to Cusheon Lake — what is reportedly a 10 to 15 per cent unaccounted-for portion of water through its pipes represents a potentially huge loss of capacity: as much as 15 million gallons, by our math, to say nothing of lost revenue for the district.
Being able to count these gallons flowing by doesn’t magically produce any more of them; it’s as important as ever to be thoughtful with water use on our island. Thankfully that job will get a little easier for NSSWD customers, as the district is making our data available to us so we can keep as close an eye as we care to on how much of a difference our various water-saving efforts might be making.
The closest to “magic” we might see from the new meters is that leaks will almost certainly be spotted sooner. In 2022, one Salt Spring homeowner was stuck with a $29,000 water bill from a wintertime leak that lost more than 865,000 gallons of water over nearly two months — a worst-case scenario that wasn’t noticed until the meter was manually read.
We were happy to hear that the district is taking steps to ensure all that collected data — as hopefully uninteresting to nefarious parties as water usage numbers might be — is being held responsibly.
Meanwhile, there’s no consumption data to protect for Fulford Water Service system customers — there are fewer than 100 of them — notably the “last holdouts,” as one trustee put it, to deliver residential water on Salt Spring without meters altogether. Fulford operates on a flat-rate billing structure. But that district’s five-year plan this year quietly laid out buying and installing residential water meters under “future projects for 2027-2030,” so those days may be numbered.
The first batch of meters will start going in before the New Year, and within the next three everyone who receives a NSSWD bill will be able to watch every drop.