Guides
WaterPesa guides & explainers
Answer-first water billing, metering and operations content designed to be useful to people and legible to search and AI systems.
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37 focused pages
How to pay a water bill with M-PESA
A practical guide to account references, payment confirmation, receipts and reconciliation.
02Why is my water bill high?
A structured way to investigate usage spikes, leaks, estimated reads, tariff changes and account adjustments.
03Smart water meters in Kenya
What smart meters can measure, how data reaches software, common protocols and why interoperability matters.
04Water leak detection: from alert to verified repair
How meter and network signals can identify abnormal water use and how to verify whether a repair worked.
05Apartment submeter billing explained
How master meters, unit submeters, common areas, move-ins and payment reconciliation fit together.
06How to read a water meter
Understand cumulative readings, units, reading dates, rollover and why one number without context can be misleading.
07Water bill reconciliation
How to connect meter readings, tariff calculations, bills, customer payments and provider settlements.
08What belongs on a water-usage dashboard?
The metrics, confidence indicators and actions that turn usage charts into decisions.
09Water outage communication
How to publish service notices with affected area, start time, updates, restoration and customer follow-up.
10Prepaid vs postpaid water
A neutral comparison of credit, billing, meter capabilities, consumer safeguards and operational tradeoffs.
11Landlord water billing: a transparent model
A practical structure for meter evidence, tenant allocation, common-area water, arrears and disputes.
12Water utility customer self-service
What customers should be able to do themselves without creating risk for billing or operational controls.
13How prepaid water-meter software works
Understand the relationship between payment, customer/account identity, meter/CIU identity, STS vending and meter acknowledgement.
14How water rationing schedules should be communicated
How utilities and property operators can publish planned supply windows without confusing them with unplanned outages.
15Water-meter tamper signals and investigation
A practical framework for reverse-flow, seal, bypass and zero-use signals without treating algorithmic alerts as proof of fraud.
16What is a water-meter passport?
How meter identity, installation, seal, certification, firmware/connectivity and swap history fit together.
17Water-quality data in a utility platform
How to store sensor, field and lab observations with source evidence and versioned rules without overclaiming health conclusions.
18Water utility data portability checklist
What to require so customer, meter, telemetry, billing, payment and audit history can move between systems.
19How to define water utility KPIs
Why every KPI needs a formula, period, population, source coverage and confidence before it can be compared.
20M-PESA water-payment reconciliation explained
What happens after a mobile-money callback and why settlement, allocation and reversals need separate accounting states.
21Software for small-scale water providers
The minimum digital operating system for community schemes, estates and small water operators.
22What is water data lineage?
How to trace a water bill or NRW claim from raw meter evidence through calculations and operational actions.
23How to replace water-meter software without replacing every meter
A practical migration sequence for utilities and properties that want to change the software layer while preserving compatible field hardware.
24How CIU-to-meter binding should be managed
Why CIU pairing needs its own lifecycle, authorization and history rather than one mutable meter-number field.
25How gateway store-and-forward affects water-meter data
What happens when collectors lose connectivity, buffer readings and later upload a burst of historical data.
26Remote water-valve command safety checklist
A governance checklist for disconnection/reconnection or other physically consequential remote meter commands.
27Prepaid water service policies and consumer safeguards
How low-balance alerts, grace water, emergency credit, disputes, protected-customer holds and restoration rules can be designed as auditable policy.
28How to build a water-system migration crosswalk
A practical method for mapping legacy customers, accounts, connections, meters, CIUs, payments and history into canonical identifiers.
29NFC and local diagnostics for water meters
How local meter state can help technicians reconcile valve, balance, alarm, firmware and frozen-read differences when cloud telemetry is stale.
30Authorized API discovery for a water-utility migration
What to inventory from an incumbent platform before building adapters: schemas, auth class, pagination, idempotency, errors, exports and correlation IDs.
31How to design water alarm rules without creating alarm fatigue
Version thresholds, rate-of-change logic, suppression and correlation so one operational event does not become dozens of duplicate alarms.
32Disaster recovery for water-utility software
How to set RPO/RTO, verify backup freshness, time actual restores and rehearse rollback before replacing a revenue or metering platform.
33How to validate report parity during utility software replacement
Why matching a legacy dashboard visually is not enough and how frozen-input report replay catches hidden formulas.
34How to migrate scheduled jobs safely
A checklist for cron jobs, billing workers, notifications, exports and control tasks hidden inside an incumbent platform.
35How to run water-utility software in parallel before cutover
How to compare bills, payments, reads and operational state between an incumbent platform and WaterPesa without double-writing production state.
36Canary and batch migration for water software
Why bounded customer/meter cohorts reduce cutover risk and how to set quantitative hold/rollback thresholds.
37What to monitor after a water-software cutover
A first-hours and first-billing-cycle checklist for incidents, defects, money variance, read completeness and customer complaints.