All posts by charlottewater

Billing, General

How Condo and Townhome Communities Can Reduce Water Bills

Cutting water bills in condo communities is not just a way to save money; it’s a chance to build a more sustainable future for everyone. Here are some strategies to consider:

1. Upgrade to Low-Flow Fixtures: In older condos and townhomes, reduce water usage by installing low-flow faucets, showerheads, and toilets. These eco-friendly fixtures can slash water consumption significantly without sacrificing performance, making a strong impact on monthly bills.

2. Educate Residents: Promote easy-to-follow water-saving habits, such as taking shorter showers, turning off taps while brushing teeth, and running full loads in dishwashers and washing machines.

3. Monitor Water Use: Dive into past water bills to uncover trends and identify peak consumption times. Consider sub-metering units or other technology to find potential leaks.

4. Conduct Regular Plumbing Checks: Schedule routine inspections to catch leaks in pipes, faucets, and toilets. Even minor leaks can waste water and dollars, so addressing them promptly can lead to significant savings.

5. Revamp Landscaping: If your community features shared outdoor spaces, consider transitioning to drought-resistant plants and employing xeriscaping techniques that require minimal irrigation. Pair this with an efficient drip irrigation system to maximize water efficiency.

6. Offer Conservation Incentives: Introduce rewards for residents who actively reduce their water usage or report leaks. Incentives can motivate everyone to conserve this precious resource.

7. Consider Rainwater Harvesting: If applicable, investing in rainwater collection systems can provide a sustainable source of water for irrigation or other non-potable uses.

Charlotte Water calculates your bill based on a tiered system, meaning the more you use, the more you pay.

An average customer uses around 7 Ccf per month, which is 5,236 gallons!

What is a Ccf? Ccf is an abbreviation that represents 100 cubic feet, which equals 748 gallons.

Understanding Rates and Fees
The drinking water and sewer/wastewater systems are both managed by Charlotte Water and are paid for by water bill fees, not property tax dollars. The public storm drainage system is managed by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services and paid for by storm water fees, not property tax dollars.

Water Usage Rates: Charges for drinking water vary based on the amount of water used and rates are broken into four rate tiers. Usage is measured in Ccf, or one hundred cubic feet, increments. 1Ccf = 748 gallons. Meter readings reflect cumulative totals from one billing cycle to the next and usage is only charged per whole Ccf (rounded down). A partial Ccf will roll over and be included in the next billing cycle.

Sewer Usage Rates: Charges for sewer use are based on the amount of water used for customers with water and sewer service. For customers with wastewater service only, the fee is calculated based on the typical household water consumption.

Fixed Fees: The fixed fees for both water and sewer services recover the cost of servicing accounts, such as the cost of meter reading and billing.

Availability Fees: Availability fees pay for water and sewer projects. The fees vary based on the size of a customer’s meter connection and the number of service days in each billing cycle.

Storm Water Services Fees: Fees are used to repair public storm drainage infrastructure, reduce flood risks, and improve surface waters. Detached single-family residential homes are grouped into one of four billing tiers based on the amount of impervious surface area on the parcel. All others (commercial and attached single-family homes such as duplexes and apartments) are billed for the actual amount of impervious surface area on the parcel. Impervious surfaces include rooftops, concrete driveways, and other areas that do not allow rainwater to absorb into the ground.

Learn more at https://www.charlottenc.gov/water/Pay-your-Bill/Rates-Fees

Here are a few other sources

CHARLOTTE WATER 2024 RATE ADJUSTMENT | Charlotte Water Blog

Why Does Wastewater Cost More On My Water Bill? | Charlotte Water Blog

Have A High Water Bill? Read This. | Charlotte Water Blog

Understanding Homeowners Responsibility | Charlotte Water Blog

New Bill Design – YouTube about water bill look

How To Read Your Charlotte Water Meter

General, Wastewater, Water Quality

Unlocking a New Level of Progress with a Plant: Nuvoda Pilot

Are small plant pieces key to a new level of greatness in the Queen City’s wastewater treatment process? Charlotte Water’s Sugar Creek Water Resource Recovery Facility (WRRF) has set out on a 12-month mission to learn.

Kenaf sample in an Imhoff Cone, the tool used to check how much kenaf is currently in Sugar Creek WRRF’s basins.

Nuvoda, a wastewater solutions company in Raleigh, NC, created the Mobile Organic Biofilm (MOB™) Process. The star of the show called kenaf is a fast-growing plant that can get rid of up to 10 tons of carbon dioxide per acre while growing. That’s eight times as much as evergreen trees! 

So, how does it work? Small pieces of kenaf are in all stages of Sugar Creek’s secondary treatment process. Its job is to help make space for helpful biofilms to grow.

Biofilms, a slime-like layer found in nature, grow on surfaces to eat the “waste” in wastewater and help solids settle faster.  This leads to treated water that can be safely returned to the environment.

The kenaf material is also reusable! A giant sift-like tool separates kenaf from the water. Screens inside of the filter are small enough to catch and make sure no kenaf is wasted or left to come out in your kitchen sink. Sugar Creek’s maintenance team even added some helpful features, like a ramp for it to fall out of the sift, into the bin below.

Muriel Steele, Water Process Engineer, guiding kenaf down a custom-made ramp through the final stages of the MOB cycle.

MOB and kenaf have other perks, too.

Chemicals like ammonia have to be controlled carefully while treating wastewater. The microorganisms needed to treat ammonia can be hard to grow in cold temperatures, but biofilms can provide a cozy space for these specialists to grow. Kenaf boosts the amount of space for the biofilms.

Treatment facilities need to run as smoothly as possible during storms. Improved settling thanks to the kenaf can help with higher water flows during rainy days. So, as the extra water comes into the plant from bad weather, solids settle faster and there is a lower chance of anything unwanted continuing to the next treatment stage.

Kenaf is grown in Cameron, NC, and Charlotte Water is working to include these fields in our biosolids program. Biosolids are a nutrient-rich material made from treated wastewater, used to help plant growth and keep a healthy environment.

The Nuvoda MOB pilot is a chance for Charlotte Water to improve for the future by lowering costs and getting ready for the city to grow. By exploring this new process, Sugar Creek WRRF is gathering useful data to help make decisions for improvements. All thanks to a plant! 

To learn more about MOB and kenaf, visit Nuvoda’s website.

Video | Nuvoda: The MOB™ Process

Video | Nuvoda: Natural Ballasted Media for the MOB™ Process

General

Microplastics Reduction Researched at Charlotte Water

Jordan Landis taking a sample at the Irwin Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Charlotte Water (CLTWater) is using sophisticated equipment to monitor water quality, and yes even wastewater quality, to look for emerging contaminants like microplastics.


Microplastics are defined as plastic materials less than 5 millimeters in size. They can be seen without the use of a microscope. However, nanoplastics are an emerging topic because of the need for powerful microscopes to observe and quantify them. Microplastics shed from plastic products and end up flushed down the drain to wastewater treatment plants and eventually into creeks. Even washing clothes will break down polyester and spandex materials and flush the microplastics into wastewater plants.

CLTWater sponsored an internship program to research microplastics and possible ways to reduce their impacts before the treated water enters creeks. Jordan Landis, a Charlotte Water intern and PhD student at the University of Michigan, studied the presence of microplastics in wastewater under the direction of Muriel Steele, a Charlotte Water Wastewater Process Engineer, and tested possible ways to use certain algae to help break the plastics down and remove them.

The original scope of the project was to bioengineer an algae species that would be able to excrete an enzyme that could break down PET-type plastics. However, the scope of this research has shifted to using the original bacteria species that was found to naturally excrete this plastic-degrading enzyme (the enzyme gene from this bacteria was placed into the algae) and culture that to break down plastics. Macroalgae species are proposed to be used to help capture the plastics to keep them in the system during the treatment process while the bacteria can eat the plastics off the algae.

During the testing process, Ms. Landis was unable to obtain the preferred bioengineered algae species and decided to use the wild-type strain of the bioengineered algae.

Ms. Landis cultured the wild-type algae in CLTWater wastewater to understand the growth behaviors and nutrient uptake of the algae species. This knowledge will help optimize the bioreactor design with the algae before introducing plastics.

The preliminary results were more qualitative in nature, examining how well the algae would grow. Originally an algae-growing salt solution was used to jumpstart our cultures, but it was found that the wastewater was more effective.

In the future, the next step is to develop microplastic quantification methods at Charlotte Water that will help efficiently derive microplastic removal data from bioreactor studies. After this, the bacteria found to excrete the plastic-degrading enzyme naturally will be studied in CLTWater wastewater to understand its metabolic behavior and growth response to the wastewater growth medium.

Video at WSOC-TV news article (UNC Charlotte research hopes to use algae to remove microplastics from water)

Other resources

Behind the Scenes, Employee Spotlights, General, How Things Work, News, What's Going On?

Charlotte Water is Back in the Reclaimed Water Business!!!

Charlotte Water is once again providing reclaimed water to customers in the University Area, after a 10-year hiatus.  Charlotte Water’s Mallard Creek Water Resource Recovery Facility (WRRF ) produces high-quality reclaimed water that is distributed to permitted users, who use the water for irrigation and cooling tower water.  The reclaimed water system was constructed and placed into service in 1997 and provided permitted users with high quality reclaimed water until 2014.  When the Mallard Creek WRRF experienced an illicit discharge of PCB’s (Polychlorinated Biphenyls) in 2014, the Reclaimed Water System was shut down to protect permitted user’s systems from potential contamination.

Following the illicit PCB discharge to the Mallard Creek WRRF, the facility underwent a lengthy decontamination process in order to ensure the facility was free of PCBs.  After the decontamination process, the Mallard Creek WRRF was due for  Improvements and Capacity Expansion, due to the growth in the University Area. As the Improvements and Capacity Expansion were nearing completion, discussions with previous and potential new reclaimed water users began, and a timeline was set for the Reclaimed Water System to be re-activated.  The goal was to have the Reclaimed Water System back in service by the Summer of 2024.

The work to get the Reclaimed Water System back in service started in the early part of 2023.  Charlotte Water’s Environmental Management Division (EMD) started discussions throughout the department to plan for restarting the Reclaimed Water System after being dormant for 10 years.The various groups within Charlotte Water that came together for this effort included; Field Operations, Engineering, Water Treatment, Maintenance, Backflow, Customer Service, IT, and Laboratory Services.  This cross-functional team, with Leadership from Billy Allen (CLTWater’s Reclaimed Water System Coordinator), successfully conducted major required activities to get the system ready for operation once again.The major activities that needed to take place, included locating all valves and air release stations, exercising valves, testing backflow preventers, rebuilding air release stations, clearing right of ways, flushing of the reclaimed water pipelines with potable water, pressure testing the system with potable water, repairing two significant leaks, final flushing with reclaimed water, and sampling of the reclaimed water to ensure reclaimed water quality standards are being met.

Once the hard work from this cross-functional team was complete, Charlotte Water was ready to place the Reclaimed Water System back into service for the first time in 10 years.  On the morning of November 7th, a team from Charlotte Water’s EMD and Maintenance Divisions, completed the Switchover from Potable Water to Reclaimed Water, at The Tradition Golf Course, which Mecklenburg County owns.  CLTWater EMD and Maintenance Division Staff accompanied Pinnacle Golf Staff (the contract golf course operator for Mecklenburg County) onto the course, to observe them restarting their irrigation system on reclaimed water and were able to confirm the successful transition back to reclaimed water, by seeing reclaimed water applied to the green on hole 16.

Currently, the only user that is actively receiving Reclaimed Water is The Tradition Golf Course, however the University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC) hopes to begin receiving and utilizing reclaimed water sometime in 2025.  UNCC constructed a  reclaimed water pipeline on their campus in 2022.  CLTWater is also looking at ways to further expand the Reclaimed Water System in the University Area, as the use of reclaimed water offsets the use of potable water for irrigation and cooling tower water, as it reduces the impact on Charlotte Water’s Inter-Basin Transfer (IBT ) Certificate.

Many Charlotte Water Staff Members contributed greatly to this monumental effort, and everyone who participated should be extremely proud of this accomplishment!  The Restarting of the Reclaimed Water System could not have happened without your hard work and dedication.  A special recognition to the efforts of Rogers Brown, Corey Butler, Larry Davis, Don Rivers, and Shuhurah Lee, who all helped immensely with this effort in the field, during the past few months!