This week on Wonderful Water, join 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck for a conversation with Todd Taylor, general manager of operations at OWASA.
In the course of providing water to its community, OWASA treats more than 2 billion gallons of water over any given year and flows all of that water to local businesses and residences alike.
“It’s interesting that it all starts out as rainfall that we collect in the University Lake and a Cane Creek reservoirs,” said Taylor. “Then we pump it back to our water treatment plant there on Jones Ferry Road, where we run it through some physical and chemical processes to make it safe for drinking. And then we pump that out into the system through about 400 miles of pipe to get it to residents where they can use it for their daily needs.”
One consistent topic of discussion is the management of OWASA funds allotted for infrastructure repair, replacement improvement and construction. According to Taylor, some settling tanks at the treatment plant found on Jones Ferry Road were built as far back as the ’40s. Not all of OWASA’s equipment dates back decades, however — customers may have already noticed a change in how water usage is calculated.
“Our [new] meter reading system … is a near real-time meter reading system, where before we actually went out and physically read meters by hand and we’d only read them once a month,” said Taylor. “Now we have daily readings that come in that give us hourly use — and customers can access that information on a mobile device or their laptop if they sign up for the service.”
According to Taylor, this new up-to-the-hour meter reading system has numerous advantages over the older method: including the ability to better diagnose leaks and inefficiencies in water systems.
“It gives [customers] a lot of insight into their own consumption,” said Taylor. “They can also set notifications in there. You know, if you decide ‘I only want to be notified if I use more than a hundred gallons of water a day,’ the system will send you a notice if you exceed that and you can look into what you’re doing and adjust your behaviors.”
You can listen below for the full conversation between Aaron Keck andTodd Taylor below, and visit the Wonderful Water page here for more interviews with — and stories from — the people who keep our community growing by keeping the water flowing.
Chapel Hill and Carrboro residents use roughly 7 million gallons of water a day, and “Wonderful Water” is a monthly conversation sponsored by the Orange Water and Sewer Authority highlighting its work to keep our community growing and water flowing.
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