A small city that runs its own water and power usually already has the meter data. Meters get read, a file lands somewhere, and the billing office turns it into a bill. Until that bill arrives, almost nobody looks at the numbers.
That is how a slow leak runs for a month. The resident does not see the usage. The city does not see it either. Both find out when the bill is high.
Utility Insights is an add-on module for Bloomz for Cities that puts those numbers where people can use them. It is priced by the number of meters monitored. This post covers what residents see, what staff see, and how it handles the data.
What a resident sees
My Home shows this month’s power and water so far. The usage charts show power by the hour and water in 6-hour blocks, by day and by month. Once a home has 14 days of readings, a shaded band marks what is usual for that home. If a reading is missing, the chart shows a gap. It never shows a zero.
A resident sees only their own home. The same screens work in the web app and on mobile, in English, Spanish and Arabic, with other languages machine-translated.
Alerts that say what happened
Bloomz sends a household an alert for a leak, a burst, a stuck appliance or high daily use. Each alert carries an evidence chart and an estimate: about so many gallons or kilowatt-hours a day, and about so many dollars a day. It can arrive by push, text, email or a voice call, and each channel has its own consent. Quiet hours apply, but a burst alert is never held.
The resident can mark an alert as seen, or report a problem, which opens a case for city staff. They can set a personal goal or a stricter limit, turn on an away mode, and add co-recipients from the same household.
When a meter looks unreliable, usage alerts to the household pause, so a bad reading never looks like a leak. Four alerts are for city staff only and are never sent to residents: a stopped meter, use in a vacant home, a feed gap and tampering.
Bills in the app
A resident opens a bill and sees its lines and rates, a daily usage chart behind it, and how the billed amount compares with what the meter recorded. An estimate shows what the next bill is likely to be, and the invoice PDF is one tap away when the city provides it. Bills are viewed in Utility Insights. Paying is handled by the city’s existing payment option and is not part of this module.
A monthly home report
On the 2nd of each month, a resident gets a report showing where their home sits among similar homes, in the same neighborhood and size range. If the neighborhood has fewer than 10 similar homes, the comparison widens to the whole city, and no comparison is shown only when the whole city has fewer than 10. The report finds usage patterns, such as an always-on load, an evening peak, a hot-day climb, outdoor watering in summer or a slow overnight leak. Each pattern comes with a tip priced from the home’s own latest bill. The year-over-year comparison is weather-adjusted once a home has a year of history, using public NOAA temperature data, and the hot-day pattern compares power use with temperature. It arrives by push and email, in the resident’s language.
What city staff see
The overview shows neighborhood totals, with small groups hidden. The at-risk list ranks meters by urgency. Each row has a usage sparkline and columns for the current and prior hour or 6-hour block, the last 24 hours, the day, the last day reported and when someone was last notified. Meter detail shows the readings behind a row. A case has steps, an assignee and a close with a reason, and each step finishes with a result.
Staff can create an alert for a home or a meter, or write a notice such as a water shut-off for repairs. The editor shows a preview for each channel and language, and staff can edit each one before it goes out. Only City admins can send a notice, and a resend waits 30 minutes.
Alert rules are versioned. Before saving a change, a city can preview what it would have raised over recent readings. A preview sends nothing.
Feeds, bills and letters
Feed health shows which files arrived, which meters are unknown and which accounts did not match a household. Bill reconciliation flags a bill that is more than 3% off the meter, and a home with missing reads is never flagged. When nobody in a household can be reached by app, text, email or call, a printable letter appears in the Letters tab, where staff open the PDF, print it in-house, post it and mark it printed. For cities with Bloomz Pulse, open critical alerts and stale feeds also appear as attention items in the city’s Pulse dashboard, as counts only, never which households.
How it handles the data
Utility Insights reads the files your city already produces: the meter-read file, hourly or every 6 hours, and the daily billing file. Your onboarding team confirms the column layout against a sample file first.
Hourly meter readings are the city’s records. The module is designed to keep them inside the city’s own Bloomz account, and designed to help the city protect utility records under Florida’s section 119.0713(5). Confirm how it applies to your city with your city attorney. Staff see a single home’s data only when the city has given them access, and every one of those views is logged. A City admin can read the log in the app, filter it by date, staff member or type, open it for one home from the meter detail, and export it. It never shows usage numbers, and reading it is itself recorded. Texts carry alerts, not promotions, and honor STOP.
Pricing
Utility Insights is a separate add-on module, priced by the number of meters monitored. Request a quote and we size it to your meter count.
Where to look
The Utility Insights page has the interactive screens. What’s New for Cities shows where the module sits next to everything else, and a short demo call can walk through it with your meter files in mind.