How to Monitor Water Usage
June 30, 2026
Summary: Calgary is spending $342 million to recover water it never knew it was losing. The same invisible problem exists inside multifamily buildings across the country, and property owners have a much cheaper way to solve it.
Calgary just made headlines. City officials announced a $342 million proposal to reduce the amount of treated water the city loses to leaky pipes over the next four years. The goal is to bring annual water loss down from somewhere between 20 and 24 percent to 15 percent by 2030.
Do the math on that. Depending on where current losses actually sit, Calgary is spending roughly $38 million to $68 million for every percentage point of water recovered. And that’s for water that was already treated, already pressurized, and already paid for.
It sounds staggering. But when you understand how this problem actually happens, it makes a lot more sense.
Here is the honest truth about infrastructure neglect: it rarely happens because nobody knew better. Calgary’s councillors acknowledged that the city has underspent on water infrastructure for over 15 years. That is not incompetence. That is politics.
Water disappearing silently underground does not generate headlines. It does not show up on anyone’s radar until a main bursts, a neighbourhood floods, or a report lands on the council table. New arenas generate votes. Bike lanes generate debates. Leaky pipes generate nothing until they generate a catastrophe.
To be fair to Calgary’s city council, they are doing the right thing now. Fixing decades of deferred maintenance is expensive and unglamorous. They deserve credit for taking it seriously.
But the lesson here is not just about municipal water systems. The same invisible problem plays out inside multifamily and commercial buildings every single day. Water drains silently. Bills creep upward. Nobody connects the dots until the number on the invoice becomes impossible to ignore.
Calgary is dealing with hundreds of kilometres of aging buried infrastructure spread across a large, complex system with gravelly soil that causes leaks to drain downward rather than surface. Detection is hard. Repair is expensive. And you cannot simply monitor your way out of a problem that requires physical excavation at scale.
Buildings are not like that. The plumbing is accessible. The failure points are knowable. And here is where the 80/20 rule becomes very relevant.
In multifamily buildings, a relatively small number of sources tend to drive the overwhelming majority of water waste. Toilets are the biggest culprit. At any given moment, roughly one in five toilets in a multifamily building is leaking. One toilet. Running silently. Draining thousands of litres every month. Now multiply that across 50 or 100 or 200 units.
The problem is not everywhere equally. It is concentrated. And concentration means it can be found.
North Park Terrace is a 30-unit apartment building managed by York Property Management. Before they installed a water monitoring system, they had no real visibility into their consumption. Water came in. Water went out. The bill arrived every month, and nobody could tell you why the number was what it was.
Once a Water Monkey device was installed on the building’s main water meter, the data told a different story. Continuous flow. Night and day. The kind of baseline that only makes sense if water is running somewhere it should not be. A water audit confirmed what the monitoring data was already pointing to: multiple toilet leaks throughout the building, quietly draining 15.69 litres per minute around the clock.
The fix was not complicated. A plumber replaced the toilets. Daily consumption dropped from 34,353 litres to 10,110 litres. Annualized, that translated to $39,819 in savings at a single 30-unit building.
That is not $68 million per percentage point. That is a relatively modest investment in monitoring, a water audit, and a plumbing repair that paid for itself quickly and kept paying.
That is the thing that connects Calgary’s $342 million infrastructure crisis to a 30-unit apartment building in Ontario. In both cases, the water loss was not new. It was just invisible.
Without a water monitoring system, a leak in your building is just a slightly higher bill you learn to accept. With monitoring, it is a fixable problem with a known location, a clear cost, and a straightforward solution.
The city of Calgary has no choice but to dig. Property owners have a much better option. Real-time monitoring can identify where your water is actually going, surface the 20 percent of problems causing 80 percent of your waste, and give you the information you need to act before the losses become a crisis.
Water does not disappear on purpose. It just disappears quietly. And quiet problems have a way of getting very expensive before anyone decides to pay attention.
You do not have to wait for your own $342 million moment to do something about it.
Whether you are looking for a consultation or just have general questions, we’re here to help you.
