Hi, I’m Dan Sterling, Founder and CEO of Water Hero. Today we’re going to talk about how a whole building leak detection system can save you money.
First off, water damage from burst pipes is the US insurance industry’s number one claim. It’s about 30% of claims. It’s $10 billion a year. It’s seven times more likely than fire that you’re going to have a burst pipe incident. There are ways to avoid this now with today’s internet-connected smart leak detection systems. You can save money in a variety of ways. One is that avoiding the damage in the first place is very, very key because the damage, the disruption when you do have a burst pipe incident, is profound. You can have not only ruined property, you can ruin your building. You may have to shut your business down. You may have a loss of business. That’s one huge expense you always want to avoid.
Secondarily, because this is such a big problem for the insurance industry, they’re now offering incentives and premium discounts to be proactive, install this device at your facility. That’s a second driving factor for a lot of people, just the premium savings on their insurance.
But the third one is a nice byproduct of having a internet-connected smart water meter as part of your leak detection system is that you save money on your water bill. For a lot of our commercial customers, for a lot of small businesses, that can be a huge savings. We’ve had customers that in the past have had surprise $60,000 water bills for a quarter, and they had no idea that this was coming until they got their quarterly water bill. With a internet-connected smart water meter and leak detection device, you get realtime water flow information. You can even get alerts when you’ve gone over a certain amount of usage in a hour or a day or whatever period you want to dial in.
Let me show you what these systems look like. This is the meter portion of a smart water meter. Instead of the old school odometer that has the gallons that the city would read, the electronics are reading water flow 200 times a second. This information is sent to a main control unit that has a wifi chip that puts it up to the internet and then down to your smartphone. You can see your water usage data from anywhere in the world where you have internet connectivity. Very, very powerful to be able to achieve water savings. As they say, information is power. The more information, the more granular usage you have on your water bill, not once a quarter, but minute by minute, if you want, you’re going reap big savings on your water bill.
