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How Flume Categorizes Water Use
How Flume Categorizes Water Use

An overview of how Flume uses machine learning to bring you Detail+

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Written by Grant Bernosky
Updated over a week ago

Detail+ offers you a brand new look at your water by showing you how much water the appliances in your home are using! Detail+ allows you to see what percentage of your water use comes from your toilets, showers, dishwashers, water softeners, sprinkler systems, and more. Detail+ brings you more with more data, depth, and more detail.


But how does it work?

The engineering team at Flume has a dataset of TONS of water usage events and each of the event labels. We've learned to analyze this data in order to teach our machine learning algorithms advanced data labeling. For example, a shower typically uses between 1 and 2 gallons per minute and often lasts between a few minutes and 20 minutes. In contrast, a toilet usually uses between 1 and 3 gallons and typically only lasts for 30-90 seconds. Through a process of advanced machine learning, Flume has used these patterns and many more, to build tools that can figure out what appliance is generating each drop of water!

Let’s take a look at some of these patterns to better understand how your Flume app may be classifying your water usage.

Take a look at the below graphs of water usage.

Here is a list of a few differences between them:

  • The first event uses just under 1 gallon of water per minute while the second uses between 4 - 5 gallons per minute.

  • The first event lasts about 10 minutes while the second lasts only 25 seconds.

  • The first event has a spike in water usage and then a long plateau while the second event has a quick ramp-up and a quick ramp down in usage.

From the above data and the graphs, try to make your own guesses at which appliances generated the usage for each of these events.

Graph 1

Graph 2

If you guessed that the first event was a shower and the second a toilet, you're correct! If not, that's ok. That's what Detail+ is for!

If Flume labeled your usage incorrectly, you can update the label on the Flume web Portal, to learn how to do this click HERE.

While this example only includes two data points, it is very representative of the differences we often see between different water appliances. We’re constantly working on expanding and perfecting our machine learning database. Down the line, we’ll be bringing you even MORE appliances with precise measurements! We hope you can rest assured knowing we are constantly working to improve our technology to provide a better experience for you.

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