AWWA JAW72065

This article provides water utility managers with guidance on alternative measures of water use and how these measures, or metrics, can be most appropriately used for comparing and evaluating water efficiency. There is currently no universally perfect metric for describing water use, but several metrics are better than per capita use in terms of the available data's accuracy and informational value. Water utilities and regulators have an increasing need for meaningful performance indicators and benchmarks for measuring and comparing water use. Significant improvements in the ability of water utilities to reduce "definitional noise" in monitoring and comparing water usage rates would be achieved if the water supply industry adopted a standard set of customer types and customer classification procedures. Available water production and sales records can be used to calculate both systemwide and sector-specific metrics of water use. For a systemwide metric, the only accurate and regularly updated measure of system size is the number of connections or customer accounts.

Includes 12 references, tables, figures.