Drinking water readings for 214 supply zones

What is in the water where you live, and how old that answer is

Hydro collects utility test results and household readings for two hundred and fourteen supply zones and shows you the newest one with its date. Where a zone has no recent reading it says so rather than showing you an old number in green. The app is free and always will be; what is paid for is the bulk data.

Report a supply See what it costs

Supply zones covered: 214
Median age of the newest reading: 9 days
Readings from households: 31%
Cost to a household, ever: 0

What it costs

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— The app, for householdsFree permanently. No account, no advertising, no location collected unless you pick a zone yourself, and no data about you sold to anybody for any purpose. 9.00 Strip test kit, ten testsSold at what it costs us. Chlorine, pH, hardness and nitrate. Less precise than a laboratory and the app says so on every reading it produces. 240.00 Bulk feed, research and NGOPer year. Every reading with its source, method, date and precision. Half price for anything that will be published openly, which is most of it. 2400.00 Bulk feed, commercialPer year. The same data, priced for the utilities, bottlers and consultancies that were going to build this internally. 600.00 Zone coverage sponsorshipPer zone, per year. Funds strip tests and a monthly laboratory check in a zone that is currently grey. Sponsors are named and may not see...

Where a reading comes from

1

The utility publishes

Most zones are tested by the utility on a published schedule and the results are public, in a PDF, in a format designed to be filed rather than read. We fetch those every day.
2

We parse and date it

Every figure carries the date it was taken rather than the date it was published, because a result taken in March and published in July is a March result and displaying it otherwise would be dishonest.
3

A household submits a strip test

About a third of readings come from households using a strip test we sell at cost. These are less precise and we say so on every one of them, in the same size type as the reading.
4

Both are shown, labelled differently

Utility and household readings are never averaged together. They are shown side by side with their source, their date and their method, and you are trusted to weigh them.

What this app cannot tell you

A green reading from nine days ago is not a promise about today

Water quality changes in hours. Almost every app in this category shows a reassuring colour and hides the timestamp, and that is the thing we refuse to do.

The single most important number in this app is not the chlorine residual or the turbidity. It is the age of the reading, which is why it is the largest thing on the screen. A strip test tells you about one tap at one moment. A utility result tells you about a zone on the day it was taken. Neither tells you what is coming out of your pipe right now, and a product that implies otherwise is doing real harm in a country where boil-water notices are a normal part of the year. Where a zone has no reading inside thirty days the app shows grey and the words no recent reading, and thirty-one zones are grey today.

About Hydro

What people say

It showed no recent reading instead of a green tick from March.

· 4.714285714285714 out of 5 across 7 reviews

Every reading carries its method and precision. I can filter strip tests out.
Free, no account, no advertising, and it does not ask for my location.
Thirty-one zones are grey. They publish that number monthly, at least.
The date is bigger than the reading. Once you see why, you cannot unsee it.
They refused to give a sponsor early sight of results. Good.
Strip tests are rough. The app never pretends otherwise.

Read all the reviews

Free, no account, no advertising

Tell us about a supply zone we are missing

Thirty-one zones have no recent reading and eleven parishes have zones we have not mapped at all. A message with a location does more for this than anything else you could send us.

Report a supply