Houston – As Houston water customers struggle with exorbitant bills leaving them drained, many of you don’t know that you can get real time information about how much water you’re using.
More than 85,000 Houston water customers now have new technology on their water meters. It’s a remote read sensor attached to your water meter. The device, made by Sensus, sends your meter reading to the water department remotely. Eventually, all 500,000 water meters will get a new sensor. As of February 22, 2024, Houston Public Works says it has installed more than 85,000. You can learn more about these devices here and why the city needs to replace them on every meter in the city.
When you get one, will have access to a new portal where you can see how much water you’re using hour by hour. The portal also lets you set alerts that can be sent to your phone or email warning you if you exceed a certain number of gallons in a day, week or month. There will be no more waiting for your monthly bill to see how much water the city says you’ve used. The portal lets you track it in real time.
Who can get access to the new Sensus portal
To get access, you first have to have a new remote read sensor. The city will not alert you when they install yours. You can physically go look for it on your water meter. I show you how to do that in this video.
Houston Public Works also sent out an email to some customers who received the new sensor, inviting them to “Set up your water usage alerts.” My email went to my junk box. But if you didn’t get one or you think you may have accidentally deleted it, you can log into your online water account. If you don’t already have an online account, you will need to set one up. (Don’t worry. Setting up an online water account does not mean you have to set your bills to Auto Pay or pay electronically. The online account simply lets you see your usage anytime you want to check it.)
When you log into your online account, on the home screen, under “Usage summary” on the right hand side, it will say “Usage alert service” if you have a new sensor. A HPW representative told me that you will not be able to access the portal until you have had the sensor installed for a complete billing cycle.
You will need to register or set up a Sensus account. After you do that, you will access it directly from your Houston water account page.
This is what mine looks like.
You can see that I have used 3,230 gallons of water so far in this billing cycle. I’ve received 19 alerts over the last 60 days. You set up the threshold for when you want to be alerted.
I told the portal to send me an email and a text message every time my meter registers more than 400 gallons of water in any one day, more than 1,000 in one week and more than 3,000 gallons in a month.
You can also see exactly how much water you’ve used each day and even each hour of the day. This information can be very helpful if you are getting unexplained high water bills. You could just go to the portal to see what days and times of each day it shows you are using the most water. Does it make sense? What were you doing on those days at those times?
When will every water customer have access?
The answer to this question has changed since we started our “Drained” investigation in November 2022. Houston Public Works Director Carol Haddock initially told us that the city approved the purchase of 500,000 new remote read sensors in 2019. She said the plan was to install them all over a 5-year time period. When the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, supply chain issues significantly slowed the roll-out.
At a December 6, 2023 City Council meeting, Haddock told council members that the plan was now going to take until 2030 to complete, and that there simply was no way to move faster than to install 60,000 new sensors each year.
Fast forward to March when new Houston Mayor John Whitmire gave me an exclusive one-on-one interview about the water department problems. Whitmire said he is asking the department to speed up the replacement of about 100,000 sensors that no longer work at all. He wants them to replace those within the next 9 months by January 2025.
“We’re doing everything we can now,” Whitmire said. You know, I’m assuming again, the malfeasance on behalf of the city government- they didn’t have the capacity to play catch up. That’s part of the problem. When you plan for a 5-year replacement, and I want it done in 9 months, it does make the supply chain become an issue. So, you know, we got to deal with that. And so we’re going to start purchasing equipment tomorrow.”
Our Investigation continues
We will keep bringing you new information about water bills in Houston as soon as we learn about it.
KPRC 2 Investigates led by Investigator Amy Davis has been looking into water bill issues for 20+ months. Check out our ‘DRAINED’ Investigation here for resources on getting water bill help.
