San Jose Water's advanced leak detection program saved an estimated 376 million gallons of water in 2025 alone, enough to fill Levi's Stadium more than five times over. That number did not come from a single dramatic fix. It came from 445 separate leaks caught across water mains, service laterals, hydrants, and individual customer connections, most of them identified only because a network of smart meters and acoustic sensors flagged unusual flow patterns that would have gone unnoticed under the old model of reading a meter once every sixty days. For a utility serving one of California's largest cities in a state where every drop increasingly matters, that shift from periodic manual reads to continuous, sensor-driven monitoring is arguably the single most consequential IoT deployment happening in the South Bay right now, and it is still only about halfway finished.
Advanced metering infrastructure, commonly shortened to AMI, replaces traditional water meters with smart meters that transmit near real-time usage data instead of requiring a technician to physically read a dial every couple of months. The California Public Utilities Commission approved a 100 million dollar investment in San Jose Water's AMI project in 2022, with full implementation expected by 2027. As of the end of 2025, the utility had installed more than 125,000 smart meters, over half of its total service area, with the remaining rollout continuing through 2026 and into 2027.
What makes this deployment more than a billing upgrade is the data layer sitting behind it. San Jose Water's SJWaterHUB customer portal now gives households near real-time consumption data, daily usage tracking, and customizable alerts, and in the second half of 2025 alone the system generated more than 46,000 automated leak alerts to customers. Combined with hydrant-mounted acoustic leak sensors deployed across the distribution network, the utility is running what amounts to a continuous, citywide diagnostic system for its own pipe infrastructure, something that was simply impossible under a bimonthly manual meter-reading model.
California's water utilities operate under sustained pressure that most of the country does not face to the same degree, a combination of persistent drought risk, aging distribution infrastructure, and rising demand from both population growth and new data center development across the South Bay. Non-revenue water, the term utilities use for water that is treated and pumped but never billed because it leaks out of the system before reaching a customer, represents a direct financial and environmental cost. Every gallon lost to an undetected leak in a water main is a gallon the utility paid to treat and pump for no return, and in a service area with over 230,000 water meters, even a small percentage of undetected loss adds up to a meaningful volume over a year.
San Jose Water has stated that reducing non-revenue water through this program puts the utility's loss rate well below comparable industry benchmarks, a claim backed by the specific leak count and volume figures the company has published. That level of transparency is itself somewhat unusual in the water utility sector, where infrastructure performance data has traditionally been harder for the public to access than equivalent data from electric utilities.
The customer-facing smart meter is only half of San Jose Water's sensor strategy. The other half runs quietly underground, using acoustic sensors mounted on hydrant caps and distribution infrastructure that listen for the specific sound signature of pressurized water escaping through a crack or joint failure in a pipe. A leak under pressure produces a distinct, continuous acoustic signal that differs from normal flow noise, and by distributing listening devices across the network rather than relying on visible surface leaks or customer complaints, the utility can catch underground leaks in mains and service laterals long before they surface as a sinkhole or a wet patch of pavement. This is the layer of the system responsible for catching many of the 18 water main leaks and 120 service lateral leaks San Jose Water identified in 2025, categories of leak that a customer-facing smart meter alone would never detect, since they occur upstream of any individual customer's connection.
Combining these two sensor layers, customer meters for usage-side leaks and acoustic sensors for infrastructure-side leaks, gives the utility a far more complete picture than either technology alone. A smart meter can tell a homeowner their toilet is running constantly. An acoustic sensor can tell the utility a water main under a street three blocks away has developed a slow leak that has not yet reached the surface. Both matter, and both were essentially invisible under the previous generation of water infrastructure monitoring.
- Plan for a multi-year phased rollout, not a single cutover. San Jose Water's AMI project is structured as a four-year deployment specifically because replacing hundreds of thousands of individual meters across a large service area cannot happen overnight without massive field labor costs.
- Pair smart meters with network-level leak detection. Customer-facing smart meters catch leaks inside a home or business, but acoustic sensors mounted on hydrants and distribution infrastructure catch the main-line and service lateral leaks that account for a large share of total water loss.
- Build the customer portal alongside the hardware rollout, not after it. The value of AMI data is limited if customers cannot act on it, which is why San Jose Water launched its SJWaterHUB portal in parallel with meter installation rather than waiting for full deployment to finish.
- Expect gradual rate impact and communicate it clearly. AMI deployment carries real infrastructure cost, and utilities pursuing similar programs should expect customer questions about bill impact, which San Jose Water has addressed directly through public FAQ documentation throughout its rollout.
| Challenge | Description |
|---|
| Field installation labor and cost | Physically swapping hundreds of thousands of meters requires a multi-year deployment schedule and dedicated field crews |
| Customer data privacy concerns | Utilities must clearly communicate what data is and is not transmitted from smart meters |
| Legacy pipe infrastructure | Detecting a leak with a sensor does not repair aging distribution infrastructure, which still requires capital investment |
| Rate impact communication | The infrastructure investment behind AMI programs affects customer bills, requiring transparent utility communication |
These challenges mirror broader patterns seen across other utility and energy IoT deployments in the region, including the grid capacity upgrades happening at PG&E substations nearby, where sensor-driven infrastructure management is increasingly the fastest lever utilities have to address capacity and reliability pressure that physical construction alone cannot match on a reasonable timeline.
While most coverage of AMI programs focuses on residential customers, the same near real-time data has significant implications for commercial properties, HOAs, and institutional water users across Santa Clara County. For commercial properties and homeowners associations, AMI facilitates collection of more frequent, often hourly, water use data that facility managers can use to better track irrigation systems, cooling tower consumption, and common-area usage that used to only show up as a single lump sum on a bimonthly bill. A large commercial property with a slow leak in an irrigation line, a common and often expensive problem for South Bay office campuses with significant landscaped grounds, can now be flagged within days rather than discovered two months later on a bill that is unexpectedly high with no clear explanation of where the extra usage came from.
San Jose Water's stated timeline has full AMI deployment completing by 2027, at which point every one of its more than 230,000 meters will be feeding near real-time data into the same monitoring system. The company has also indicated that AMI supports its broader climate goals, with an anticipated annual reduction of roughly 103 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent once fully deployed, driven both by reduced water loss and fewer truck rolls for manual meter reading and high-bill investigations. Other water retailers across Santa Clara County are pursuing similar deployments, with more than 71,000 AMI meters already installed countywide as of recent tracking by the Santa Clara Valley Water District. For a region where water availability increasingly intersects with everything from agricultural land use in outlying areas to the cooling demands of new data centers in Alviso, the shift toward continuous, sensor-driven water infrastructure monitoring is likely to be one of the more consequential, if quieter, IoT stories in the South Bay over the next several years.
Frequently asked questions
In 2025, the advanced leak detection program saved an estimated 376 million gallons of water, identifying 445 separate leaks across water mains, service laterals, hydrants, and individual customer connections.
Advanced metering infrastructure, or AMI, replaces traditional meters that require in-person reading every 60 days with smart meters that transmit near real-time usage data, enabling much faster leak detection and giving customers daily visibility into their consumption.
As of the end of 2025, San Jose Water had installed more than 125,000 smart meters, over half of its total service area, with full deployment across more than 230,000 meters expected to be complete by 2027.
Non-revenue water is water that a utility treats and pumps but never bills for, typically because it leaks out of the distribution system before reaching a customer. Reducing it saves treatment and pumping costs while conserving a limited resource, which is especially important in drought-prone California.
Customers with AMI-enabled meters can receive automated leak alerts via text, email, or phone through San Jose Water's SJWaterHUB portal, which generated more than 46,000 automated leak alerts in the second half of 2025 alone.
Yes. San Jose Water has stated it anticipates an annual reduction of roughly 103 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent once AMI is fully deployed, driven by both reduced water loss and fewer truck rolls needed for manual meter reading and high-bill investigations.
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