This document discusses how the Las Vegas Valley Water District is utilizing advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) data and machine learning to improve water conservation efforts. It provides background on the district's service area and water sources. It then describes a project using AMI hourly water use data and machine learning to automatically detect violations of weekly irrigation schedules, replacing a previous labor-intensive process. The new approach notified over 140,000 accounts in under 10 minutes, detecting non-compliance at a rate of around 70%, dramatically increasing the effectiveness of water waste enforcement. Future applications discussed include using machine learning for time-of-use detection, pool cover detection, and water use trends/predictions.

1. Utilizing AMR and AMI Data:
Water Conservation
Dennis DeMera | Customer Care & Field Services Manager
Smart Water Utilities USA 2023

2. Las Vegas Valley Water District

3. Demographics
• Elected Board of Directors (Clark County Commission)
• Hosts ~45 million annual visitors
• Serves 1.6 million people in Southern Nevada
• Clark County is 8,061 square miles
• 415,000 Accounts | 435,000 Meters
• 90% of water from Lake Mead, 10% from groundwater
• Driest metropolitan area in the United States with less than 10 cm
of rainfall
0
20
40
Tucson, AZ
Phoenix, AZ
Denver, CO
Las Vegas, NV
Salt Lake City, UT
Albuquerque, NM

4. Drought Conditions

5. How Southern Nevada Uses Water
• Southern Nevada recycles 99% of water used indoors, thereby extending
the availability of its resources.
• About 60 percent of Southern Nevada's water is consumed outdoors for
irrigation and evaporative cooling, which cannot be reclaimed or returned
to Lake Mead.

6. Conservation Policies, Rules and Regulations
• Mandatory seasonal watering
restrictions
• Restrictions/prohibitions on
installation of new grass
• Golf course water budgets
• Incentives programs for
conservation
• Integrated public education and
outreach campaigns

7. Public Education Campaigns

8. Cross Departmental Team – Conservation
• Identified and prioritized
more than 120 potential
conservation initiatives
• Major outcomes from
recently completed:
• New Customer Information
System (C2M)
• Full-scale Advance Metering
Infrastructure
• Multiple projects involving
the use of AMI data
• Automated Water Use
Detection

9. Project Goals
Weekly Irrigation Compliance Detection
Leverage AMI data to
improve the accuracy
of irrigation detection
Reduce the number of
hours required for
watering compliance
Explore how Machine
Learning improves
existing processes
Develop an automated
program that detects
day of week irrigation
compliance

10. Machine Learning
Data used to train the A.I.
3,984,000 Individual Hourly Reads
1,162,000 Individual Days
166,000 SFR Services
98% Certainty 75% Certainty
3% Certainty

11. Review Process
24 Hour
Reads
Watering
Violations
Manual Data
Associate Review
AI Learns From
Results
24 Hour
Reads
AI Selection
Associate
Review
Watering
Violations
Continuous Improvement
The AI implements what it learns from the Data Support Associate

12. Process Evolution
Old Labor-Intensive Process
•Meter Data
•5 Sundays
•150 GPM Peak
Flow
AMR
•Exclusions
•90-Day Contacts
•Active SPs
•Export to
Spreadsheet
Power BI •Duplicate Removal
•Candidate
Selection
•Active SPs
•Export to Text File
MS Access
•Add Account Alert
•Premise
Characteristic
•Mail Merge
Control-M
4+ Hours
44,000 Accounts
Notified by mail
C2M AI Webservice
New AI Automated Process
< 10 Minutes
140,000 Accounts
Notified by mail
& mobile app
AMI

13. End Results
Who didn't change
their behavior
31%
Who changed their
behavior
69%
2022 Winter Watering Schedule Compliance
Who didn't change their behavior Who changed their behavior
Dramatically increase the
effectiveness of Water Waste
Enforcement efforts:
• 2022 Calendar year, Water
Waste investigators sent out
13,219 letters
• In a single week, ML non-
compliance pilot sent out 11,960
letters resulting in a correction rate
of approx. 70%

14. Next Steps
Future Functionality
• Mobile application notification
• SMS text in addition to/in lieu of physical letter
• Recording time/dates of violations
• Refinement to the algorithm
Future ML Applications
• Time of use detection
• Lack of pool cover detection​
• Water use trends and predictions

15. Thank You
Dennis DeMera | Customer Care & Field Services Manager
Las Vegas Valley Water District | e: Dennis.Demera@lvvwd.com