Sierra Country Club's water team used to find leaks when water surfaced where it shouldn't. With meter alerts, they see problems as they start, and can tell a homeowner the day a leak began.
Sierra Country Club runs its own water system for a small residential community. When the community moved to Subeca smart meters, Subeca introduced Current as the billing and portal software that could make the new data useful. The goal was to show homeowners more real-time usage without a big budget.
Ty Wernet, Sierra's Board Secretary and Water Director, became the day-to-day owner of the rollout. Current's team called Sierra the most organized customer they'd worked with.
Before alerts, a leak was usually found by its symptoms: wet ground, a surprise bill, or a neighbor's call. Sierra has little to no cell service, so Ty built his own process. He'd export a list, walk the community, and check each meter for a visible leak before ever contacting a homeowner.
“We didn't have meter alerts before and we would blissfully be treading on until water surfaced where it shouldn't, and now we have this tool that shows us existing or new problems.”
A walk through the community only catches what can be seen: a wet patch, a leaking meter box. A leak inside a home or under a yard shows nothing from the street.
The value showed up on the first walkthrough. When Current's team sat down with Ty and a colleague to review meter alerts, the alerts flagged a home with unusually high water use that the team hadn't noticed. They started digging into it while still on the call.
There was no visible sign of a leak anywhere on the property, and no leakage at the meter during a physical inspection. Based on the alert data, the homeowner brought in a leak detection company, which pinpointed a likely leak point. When the excavators dug it up, they found tree roots wrapped around the service line between the meter and the house. The water was soaking straight into the soil, so it never surfaced. Without early detection, that hidden leak would have cost thousands of dollars in wasted water by the end of the billing period.
So the alerts do two things. They save the time of the community walk, and they reveal what a visual inspection can't, along with when the problem started.
“We can even tell when the leak started which helps the homeowner to replay the last few days and [figure out] did they do something, like add a sprinkler to a hose and forgot about it.”
Since alerts went live, nearly half of the homes in the community have received some form of leak or continuous-flow alert. Some of those flows are tiny, less than a gallon an hour but running around the clock. Others are losing water much faster. Roughly 20% of the alerted homes turned out to have a real leak that needed action, and an early estimate puts the water saved through continuous-flow alerts at about 50,000 gallons.
Not every alert ends in a repair. A few small, intermittent flows have kept homeowners searching for hours without finding the source, and experimental digging can cost thousands. Ty sees that as the honest side of better data: the water loss is real, even when the fix isn't obvious yet.
Ty is now working out how much water the community loses to continuous flows and leaks over time, since leaks tend to get worse until they're fixed. He plans to report the numbers to the community to get more homeowners acting on their alerts.
Sierra's community is mixed. Some homeowners follow their water use in the portal. Others don't use computers at all, and pay by walking a check to the clubhouse. Ty's team wants the second group to hear from them directly, without cutting anyone off from critical notices.
So Sierra uses the tools as a set. Homeowners can opt into leak and high-usage alerts by email and text, and administrators can adjust a homeowner's notification settings when the homeowner asks them to. Sierra can also set a homeowner-facing usage threshold, so the right alerts reach the resident instead of the office. For line flushing and water system emergencies, the team sends notices by email, text, and voice call to everyone on the list, regardless of preference.
The team also wrote their own how-to guides, one for viewing water usage in the portal and one for setting leak alerts, and published them to the community along with a portal announcement.
“We continue educating our community on the app's capability and how to use the system... published the documents to the community; and have received quite a positive reception.”
With the data in front of them, homeowners have started managing it. In spring and summer, many watch their gallons to stay under Sierra's first pricing tier, since usage above it costs more per gallon.
Ty tested the alerts himself first, setting his own usage limit low and confirming the high-usage notification arrived the next morning. Now that homeowners are using them, he notes the feature is "getting some attention now that folks have started using it." On one recent account, it was a homeowner's call that sent his team back to check an alert.
“With the new features they are getting smarter and using the capabilities more.”
of homes have received some form of leak alert
of alerted homes had a real leak that needed action
of water saved through continuous-flow alerts, an early estimate
“This tool has been a game-changer for our HOA, with continuous feature updates that make water system management faster and less stressful. Manual tracking in Excel has been replaced by automated data, saving us substantial time. Crucially, having access to specific, real-time data on water loss is invaluable for making informed decisions and driving down unaccounted-for water. Our ultimate goal is empowering the homeowner with this capability, giving residents direct visibility into their own water usage so they take active ownership. We want them to use the tool as their first line of defense, knowing our water team is here to provide guidance and assistance as required.”
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