The Boston Water and Sewer Commission (BWSC) uses smart water meters which capture and transmit daily water usage to BWSC. BWSC makes that data available on their customer portal, but unlike water utilities in some other cities, they do not reliably, automatically monitor daily usage and alert customers about anomalies. That is, if your water usage in Boston suddenly spikes, you aren’t going to get an email, text, or phone call from BWSC saying, “Hey, it looks like you used a lot more water than normal yesterday, do you have a burst pipe or something?”
I know they don’t do this because I asked them. This was their response:
Currently BWSC manually reviews thousands of accounts on a weekly basis that meet the high consumption criteria and will reach out to the customer. Unfortunately not all accounts meet the criteria for a high consumption courtesy call.
I don’t want to have to log into their portal every day to check if I’ve got a big leak I don’t know about, so I wrote a script to do it for me. Perhaps you will find it useful. If you do, post a comment below and let me know!
