Agua Vista: ‘When You Use Less, You Pay Less’

Customers throughout Chapel Hill and Carrboro can take control of their water usage and save some money along the way with the help of OWASA’s Agua Vista program.

“When you use less, you pay less,” OWASA Sustainability Manager Mary Tiger summarized during an appearance on the Wonderful Water segment on WCHL.

And tracking just how much water you are using has gotten much easier recently thanks to Agua Vista. The program reads data hourly from roughly 21,000 new meters that were installed across the service area to provide customers with the most up-to-the-minute information available.

This “powerful data,” as Tiger described it, allows both OWASA and customers to know more about their water usage and ways to conserve water, while also getting to save some money.

Analyzing this flood of information on an hourly basis allows OWASA to communicate the possibility of a leak to customers “as early as data suggests,” Tiger said.

Customers can then use that information in their efforts to fix a household leak or to find times when water consumption is high and make an effort to conserve water as much as possible.

Tiger said that national studies have estimated that 10 – 12 percent of water used across the country is lost due to a leak, with toilets, faucets, and outdoor spigots being the main culprits.

OWASA customers can register for Agua Vista through the web portal with just their account number and zip code. From there, the power is in the hands of the customer to use that data to save water and money. You can sign up for Agua Vista here.