“A few years ago when I was a traveling consultant and I would always carry a TDS meter to let me know if it was OK to drink the tap water in the hotel. After a few months of doing this, I came up with an idea to create a crowd-sourced water quality website where people could post any water quality test result in order to share this knowledge. In 2010 I entered this idea as project to a social innovation competition, We Media PitchIt!. While I did not win the competition at the time, two years later I resurrected the project, self – funded it and brought it to life!
Ratemywaterquality.com is basically a geospatial water survey. Users can rate their water quality on both qualitative elements (taste, color, odor, pressure, and water type), as well as quantitative elements from the results of their consumer test kits or meters like TDS, pH, or pressure gauge. Users can rate their water quality from either their water company, or from their home well water. The dashboards summarize the questions and display them as percentages. Users of Ratemywaterquality.com can easily compare their home results to their neighborhoods averages.
There are two main features of Ratemywaterquality.com. The first is to provide crowd-sourced water quality results as described above, and the second is to provide a water alert and incident management system. The water alert system allows you to create a geospatial monitoring zone of an area, like a street, town or city. If anyone posts a water alert in your monitored zone, like low or no water, or a test strip over threshold, you will be notified through email about this issue.
A good example of this would be for people who might live in a fracking area and have well sourced water. Maybe one day that person notices their water tastes funny, so they test it. It turns out there are chemicals in their water that are over the allowable threshold. That user could create a water alert which would appear as a marker on the map. As a result, any of the neighbors with similar wells, or any regulatory agencies could see these issues or receive an email alert when they happen.
This website will only work if there are enough contributions to make it work. To learn how to use the website please watch this How to use Rate my Water video.
If you discover any bugs during the public beta period, please contact us and send them my way.
Click here to start rating your water!
– Jeff the Water Guy
For Updates & Comments, see article in Rate My Water Blog
