Aquacue Barnacle HD

Today we shipped the 1st ever Aquacue Barnacle capable of collecting data at 10 sec. intervals — a million times more frequent than your bi-monthly meter reads.

Aquacue turns any standard water meter into a smart meter in minutes. Aquacue’s system makes it simple to detect leaks, conserve water and reduce water bills.

What does a Barnacle look like?

Aquacue Barnacle in a water meter pit.

How to run a business in the 21st century

I rarely read a technical/biz book in its entirety. REWORK is an exception. I read it when I was trapped in an airplane for 8 hours traveling from San Jose to Orlando. Remarkable book, definitely worth reading. Lots of good advice and kind of justifies the seat-of-the-pants style of decision making. The book is well written, brief and witty. It is 273 pages, but the font is big with double line spacing, so it is about 100 pages with normal font and spacing. Brevity is what makes this book great. A required reading for anyone that joins Aquacue.

I enjoyed the chapter “Sell your by-products”, how true. At Aquacue, our data visualization services for the Barnacle morphed into its own product that works really well with Utility monthly billing data or customer’s own data. I never thought of it as a by-product, but that is exactly what it is.

Aquacue Barnacle & Water Conservation

Here is a follow-up story on Aquacue’s 1st pilot: “Results released by the water district this week show that those who got the feedback used 20 percent less water compared with the same period the year before…..The devices used in the study are manufactured by Los Gatos-based Aquacue and are attached to customers’ water meters. Known as Barnacles, the devices use wireless technology, the Internet and software to maintain constant water-use displays on users’ computer screens.” North County Times.

Here is the 1st story on this pilot

Aquacue 1st pilot

Aquacue 1st technical pilot is a success. The results of how much it helped to conserve will be out shortly.

Aquacue Barnacle saves the day

Over the past couple of days I was surprised at how much water the Aquacue Barnacle was reporting that we were using. The Barnacle was reporting over 80 gallons per minutes. Initially I though this was a false alert as we had just changed the software. But after some investigation that included help from San Jose Water Company we found the leak under the house. The Barnacle was right after all. Here is the proof of the leak:

The Barnacle reported water usage matched the water meter to 99.44% accuracy. The water pipe connecting the water meter to the house was old rusty galvanized pipe and it had just given up being a pipe. The cost of repair $3500 (included digging the sidewalk and front yard to get access to the water pipe and fixing the sidewalk, …). Damages to the house: none. Without the Barnacle I wouldn’t have found about the leak until after significant damage to the house was done. If I had acted immediately after the first Barnacle alert, the leak would have been detected in two hours.