Show All Answers

1. What is WaterSmart?

Spotsylvania County recently partnered with WasterSmart Software to offer our residents a modern digital portal where you can access detailed information about your household or business water use.  

WaterSmart’s online customer portal offered by Spotsylvania County Utilities allows you to:

• Track your water use
• Set alerts for possible leaks or unusual usage
• Provide you with personalized tips on saving water
• Allows you to set communications preferences

To register for this free service, visit: https://spotsylvaniava.watersmart.com/index.php/welcome. You will need your 12-digit water account number and zip code to register.

2. What is the WaterSmart Software Program?

Spotsylvania County Utilities is proud to partner with WaterSmart Software, Inc. to provide customers with an innovative engagement portal and tailored home water reports to learn more about their water usage and ways to save water and money. With WaterSmart, your data is securely hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.  WaterSmart’s application servers are protected by state-of-the-art building access controls, video surveillance, and 24x7 on-site security.  And, AWS’s facilities and security procedures are regularly subject to independent 3rd party reviews and certifications.

HIGH AVAILABILITY

WaterSmart creates daily backups of your data, and they regularly validate their documented restore and failover procedures. As an AWS customer, their servers are connected to multiple high-performance networks, uninterruptible power supplies, backup diesel generators, fire-safety systems, and a full-time operations staff to take care of any hardware problems.

SECURE AUTHORIZATION & AUTHENTICATION

WaterSmart supports SSL-encryption, uses best-practice password cipher policies, and maintains portal access logs to maximize your customers’ online security. WaterSmart’s Utility Analytics Dashboard employs role-based authentication to provide variable levels of access to administrators in the organization. WaterSmart monitors access through their engagement reports, or export the data to the reporting platform of our choice.

DATA SEPARATION

WaterSmart provisions each utility customer with its own private database schema and FTP space, eliminating the possibility of data corruption, entanglement, or privacy breach caused by data source co-mingling. Your utility and customer data is never available or visible to any other utility or their customers.

ACCESS CONTROL

WaterSmart’s servers and your data are only accessible via SSH public/private key-pair authentication. Each key-pair is individually assigned to a WaterSmart employee to ensure safe provisioning and access control procedures. In addition, each WaterSmart staff member is required to sign a non-disclosure and confidentiality agreement prior to employment.

PRIVACY & TRUST

WaterSmart faithfully adheres to their publicly posted Privacy Policy. They do not share personally-identifiable customer information with anyone without your prior authorization, period. They believe in providing transparency with their partners and pledge to notify their customers if problems arise, and to work with them to solve problems for the long term.

3. How do I register or log into WaterSmart Customer Portal?

To register:

1. Go to: https://spotsylvaniava.watersmart.com/index.php/welcome
2.  Click on Login
3. Input your 12-digit Water Account number from your billing statement and Zipcode
4. Walk-thru the automated registration flow.

Once you complete the registration, you can sign up for alerts so that you can stay informed about leaks and other high usage events at your property address.  Also, remember to check back periodically for new features in the portal.

4. How should I use the WaterSmart Customer Portal?

The WaterSmart Customer Portal is a resource to help you better understand and manage your water use.  It provides you with a social comparison, helps you track your use, and offers personalized recommendations for the most effective ways to save water.  

5. How do I customize my WaterSmart Customer Portal profile?

You can customize your Customer Portal profile through the household Profile.  You can find the Household Profile in the drop-down menu under your name in the right-hand corner.  The Household Profile will ask specific questions about your household like:

• How many people live in the house?
• How many toilets are in the household?
• Do you water your grass?
• How big is your yard?

Completing the Household Profile will improve the relevancy and accuracy of the Home Water Report generated through the portal.

6. What is the Home Water Report that I receive from my WaterSmart Customer Portal?

WaterSmart generates Home Water Reports for customers that have registered through the WaterSmart Customer Portal. These reports are base on your water usage from monthly meter readings. This report is no a bill. These reports show your usage for a specific billing period, broken down into various ways, including gallons per day (GPD is an average of the gallons used in that period divided by the number of days in that period). These reports also show the water usage for that billing period compared to the same billing period in previous years, if the billing history is available.  The Home Water Report will make suggestions on how to reduce your usage.  Information about upcoming events are also included in the Home Water Reports.

7. How am I being compared to other households on the Home Water Report?

Efficient household use is generally calculated as the 20th percentile of water use within a group of customers with similar characteristics who are grouped together for comparison. Average water use is generally calculated as the median of water use within similar groups. These groups are based on the number of occupants within a residential property, the size of the property’s irrigable area, and the type of residence. Other characteristics can be used to define the groups as well, such as geographical area.

8. Do I really use this much water?

A number of activities can lead to an increase or decrease in water usage over a period of time. Increases can possibly stem from guests in town, filling up a hot tub or pool, leaks inside or outside the home, or turning on the irrigation system in the summer. Decreases in water usage could potentially result from installing high efficient appliances, reducing irrigation schedules, fixing leaks, or members of your household moving out. 

Curious about your usage? Feel free to call your Customer Service team at 540-507-7300, Press Option 1, or email us at [email protected].  

For your own information, check out the list below of various activities that consume an average of 100 gallons of water:

• 78 high-efficiency toilet flushes
• 10 five-minute showers
• 5 loads of laundry with efficient (HE) machine
• 8 minutes running one small sprinkler zone
• 2 days of evaporation from an uncovered pool