GSA meter records
Your meters, on the record.
Some groundwater sustainability agencies, Madera County’s among them, measure your water by satellite and bill what they see over your allocation. Your wells measure water at the pump. When the two disagree, the meter record is what an appeal runs on, and it only counts if it is complete, calibrated and readable by the reviewer. That is the record we keep.
What Madera County’s appeal asks for
From the GSA’s appeal process (Resolution 2024-121, October 2024). Other GSAs have their own rules; ask us about yours.
From an approved vendor, for every meter on every well serving the appealed area.
Laboratory or field, within the required period.
Each meter’s cumulative total, recorded at least monthly.
A photo of each readout each month, or telemetry data files with daily timestamps, flow, cumulative acre-feet and monthly totals, no gaps, that GSA staff can open themselves.
Which fields each well and meter serve, acres, crop and age, irrigation system type.
Physical access to wells and fields; any surface or district water measured too.
What we keep for you
Flow rate and network status every ten minutes from the telemetry feed, the running total from the daily portal read, on all wells the feed covers.
One row per meter: total acre-feet, flow, change since last month, water-year to date, days reported, and whether the channel is groundwater, district water, or water already counted upstream. A CSV for your file and for the reviewer.
Under Madera County GSA rules, two missed months on any meter in a farm unit move the whole unit back to satellite for the year. Your dashboard and the iPhone app show each meter’s last reading and name any meter that has gone more than a week without one.
A read-only code for the GSA reviewer. Issue it from your dashboard to the GSA or its consultant; it opens the record with the CSV, expires, and can be revoked.
Reading summaries are sealed in batches on our attestation chain, so the record is tamper-evident from the point of signing forward.
Two things we will not tell you
- That meters always come out lower than the satellite. Meters count every gallon pumped, including leaching and frost water; the satellite counts what the trees used. On the county’s own verification data the two can go either way by crop and by year. The value of the record is that you have your own number to set beside the satellite’s, and you choose. A report that puts the two side by side is coming.
- That we file for you. The grower is the applicant. We prepare the record, the sheet and the reviewer access; the vendor reports, calibrations and the attestation are yours to sign.
What you need on your side
- A flow meter with telemetry on every well with a pump and power, idle wells included. We read the telemetry vendors our customers already use.
- One installation report and a calibration every two years from a GSA-approved vendor.
- The GSA sticker number for each meter and the farm unit and parcel list as filed.
Included on both plans. On the $20 per acre plan we keep the record from your own meters. On the $80 per acre plan: evidence prepared for your appeal. You file.