When I add up my daily usages, it doesn't match the billing usage reported. Why is that? Is there an error?

Glad to see the keen interest you are taking in these numbers. Goes to show you are serious about water consumption and conservation. Thank you for that.

Be assured that there is no error and the numbers are both valid, as designed. Will explain further below.

• Daily Use This number is a midnight-to-midnight calculation. At any given point, for a past date, the number you see is final. For a running date (i.e. today), this number will have delays based on cache setup. Cache delays can be up to 30 minutes at an individual connection level, and can go up to several hours for community level aggregate numbers.
• Current Month Use and Unbilled Amount Billing is calculated on current month usage. Totalling of monthly usage happens well past midnight and hence this will be slightly more than the daily totals of past days. At the time of writing this, the job runs at 7am (and hence carries the usage from midnight to 7am as well). This can vary in future based on load balancing choices made.

  Today is part of this month too, not just days in the month till yesterday. And hence usage for today at the time of job is part of monthly total.

• Monthly Bill This job runs based on the billing cycle setup for the community. By default, this runs on first day of every month for the previous month. At the time of this job the billing month is already over and there is no partial day being added, or any ambiguity in calculating usage. At this point you will note that sum of daily totals and monthly total will exactly tally. In fact, the PDF bill you can download details this.

Hope that clears up the confusion around minor difference in running month total and sum of daily numbers till previous day.

How do you detect leakage?

One commonly used method to detect leakage is to look for low rate of flow and flag them as leakage. This is the approach most meters take. This has two major flaws viz., missing a high volume leak (like toilet flush) or flagging actual low usage like water purifiers as leaks.

This is why Aegir takes a Standard Deviation based approach, where a steady flow is flagged as a leak irrespective of its rate of flow. We look for a 10-minute interval with a low-variance flow and flag that as a likely leakage.

Can a leakage alert be a false positive?

Though unlikely, it is possible that we flag a regular usage as leakage. It is unlikely because humans hardly ever have a reason to use a steady flow for 10 minutes straight. It is possible because there are rare instances of steady use. If you are getting 3+ alerts of a leak, you can be certain that there is some kind of leak. If there are one or two alerts which does not repeat, you can safely ignore that.

How do you detect a dead meter?

If a meter which is not marked as away or inactive does not report any reading for more than a day, then it is flagged dead. Also, a meter not responding to a scan request from a gateway is flagged dead.

What is the delay in reporting a reading?

• Meters that run on wired power are typically configured to report data once every 5 or 10 minutes.
• Data reported by meters are picked up by a Gateway it is paired with. Gateway aggregates and sends out this data to cloud server once every 5 minutes.
• Once this reaches the cloud server, data is persisted immediately. A job runs once every 5 minutes to compute usage from this raw data.

Hence, there is a delay of zero to 20 minutes before data reflects on the cloud servers (and hence on the apps). Data is available immediately on user and admin apps, once it is updated on the server.

It should be noted that both apps use caching of 30 to 60 minutes. Hence if you repeatedly refresh a page its data it will not change for the cache duration.

I am not getting alerts. How to troubleshoot?

Make sure you are subscribed to alerts. This can be checked in the Profile tab in Aegir app. The Alerts & Notifications toggle should be turned on (shows green). Apart from this, make sure your browser (preferably Chrome) allows notifications from app.aegir.in. In Chrome this comes under : > Settings > Notifications > Sites.

How do I know these meters are accurate?

Our volumetric and ultrasonic meters are both certified by Flow Control Research Institute of India for accuracy above 99% in their flow ranges. We test meters against the certified golden meter to ensure accuracy.

Can we use these meters for hot water?

These meters are tested for water temperature up to 80 degrees celsius.