East Valley Water District Project 5

The Public Utilities Company is offering several rebate programs aimed at promoting water conservation efforts, but they have not audited the effectiveness of these programs. The proposed project aims to validate the existing rebate programs’ effectiveness, provide recommendations to expand programs, or inform the rollout efforts of future rebate programs. The project will involve reviewing historical consumption data, using data analysis techniques to benchmark past usage on an individual level, and reviewing customer engagement with other rebate programs after the initial rebate. The expected skills of the student team include water usage audit functions, benchmarking, correlation verse causation identification, and technical writing. The data to be used includes monthly consumption data from the District’s utility billing software, Tyler Technology, and daily consumption data by meter from the recently installed AMI meter technology.

In addition, the project extension will involve assessing the most recent water consumption information and reviewing the overall water consumption to determine how much each homeowner must save to be in compliance with the regulations of SB 1157, which adjusts the indoor water use standards and requires all Californians to reduce their overall water consumption at key milestone years. The faculty advisor for this project is Laura Grant, and the required tools for the project include MS Office Suite (Word, Excel, Outlook), R or Python.