LeakBird

Because no matter what I seem to do, my toilet always seems to find a way to run for a few minutes, I often think about all of the ways in which a toilet can run or leak. When you get down to it, there are two main ways the water can outflow.

Down the overflow [...]

Property managers, landlords and water companies or utilities consider two resources their most precious:

Money
Water

Without secure cash flows and water supplies, their businesses will be under water almost instantaneously.
Because 95% of landlords and property managers pay their tenants’ water bills, it’s natural that they’re interested in where they can most effectively manage and secure the [...]

Do your tenants’ toilets keep constantly running? Do you receive high water bills maybe once or twice a year? What approaches do you take to combat this problem? What is your system for dealing with it, as a landlord or property manager?
We randomly called 10 property managers in San Francisco to enquire into this issue. [...]

(Jan. 12, 2009, The Modesto Bee)
From his desk in City Hall, Michael Cooke can tell if your toilet is running or if your automatic sprinklers have gone haywire.
Cooke is testing new software designed to track the water use of 17,000 Turlockers, then alert the biggest water hogs what they’ll pay once the city starts billing [...]

(Photo Courtesy of Treehugger.com via AP/David Zalubowski)
Tenants who fail to report leaking or running toilets to Landlords or property managers cause water billing nightmares.  Usually, the best a Landlord can do is figure out in which unit the leaking toilet condition occurred, schedule a plumber to fix the problem, foot the exorbitant water bill, then [...]

(Dec. 8, 2008, KTBS Channel 3)
Shreveport Mayor Cedric Glover’s administration wants to spend $10 million to install electronic water meters at businesses in the city…
Electronic water meters, which are automated, provide more accurate usage readings than older meters that are read by people…
The administration plan is limited to commercial water meters, although a changeover for [...]

(Oct. 8, 2008, MarketWatch)
Research indicates that more than 85 percent of water leakage in residential plumbing systems is found in the toilet and a majority of toilet leaks are caused by faulty or worn flappers. A silent leak in a [...]

(Sept. 25, Tuscon Citizen)  “The Water Conservation Alliance of Southern Arizona recently gave 61,000 leak detection kits to area water providers, though none were given to Tucson Water.“

The only problem is, few people are motivated to do the dye test every month.  Why not subsidize something that is more effective, like an acoustic battery-operated leak [...]

(August 30, SF Chronicle) “In the middle of the night, when most of Berkeley is sleeping, hundreds of underground objects are listening for sounds that people can’t hear.
“They haven’t been planted by terrorists, spies, FBI agents or mystics. Instead, the East Bay Municipal Utility District is installing the acoustic devices, known as “loggers,” in an [...]

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Last year property management and real estate behemoth CitiApartments purchased my 17-unit-or-so Victorian apartment building, which is kitty-corner to the upper east end of Dolores Park in the Mission in San Francisco. Lately my toilet, which must be from the 80’s (built some 30 years ago, in a time when natural resources seemed infinite), [...]

I’m a property manager for a mom-and-pop company that owns several residential buildings in San Francisco. In April of 2007 one of our buildings, a twenty-one unit, early 20th century Victorian in the Lower Haight, saw its water usage more than double over a two-month span, going from approximately 70,000 gallons to 168,000 gallons of [...]