Heka – What?

When people in the Homeric poems really screwed up, they would sacrifice hecatombs.  For example, when Odysseus travelled to the underworld, he met the shade of Tiresias.  Tiresias told him that Odysseus had gotten on Poseidon’s bad side by blinding his son, the Cyclops.  If he wanted to make that right, he should put an oar on his shoulder and walk inland.  Once he got to a place where people were so ignorant of the ocean that a passer-by would ask him, “What are you doing with that winnowing fan on your shoulder?”.  At that point, he was to plant the oar in the ground and sacrifice x number of hecatombs to Poseidon.  Once that was done, he could die at home, in his bed, unmolested by the god of the sea.

A hecatomb is a hundred animals.  That is a big sacrifice.  A hundred goats here, two hundred sheep there – before you know it, that is real bronze-age money.  You only sacrificed a hecatomb when you spilled a big bottle of ocean-dark wine on a very important god’s white rug.

(The ‘hecto-‘ root meant a ‘hundred’ in ancient Greek.  It shows up as ‘hectometer’ (a hundred meters), ‘hectogram’, ‘hectoliter’, usw in the metric system (In 1795, the French Academy decided to use Latin roots to divide and Greek roots to multiply.  Unlike the king’s head, the convention stuck.).  It loses the initial ‘h’ sound, denoted with a rough breathing mark in ancient Greek to become ‘ekato’ in Diner Greek.  The word-initial [h] in ancient Greek came from a proto Indo-European *[s] sound, which finds its way into some of the cognates.  For example, the ancient Greek word for ‘salt’, or ‘sea’, ‘άλς, became αλατι in Diner Greek.  The sibling nature of ‘salt’ and ‘άλς is intuitive if you remember that the [‘] came from a proto *[s] sound.  By contrast, ancient Greek ‘έκατον most likely came from a proto Indo-European word *k’mtom (pronounced something like ‘kymtom’, with the initial ‘k’ sound followed by a palatalized glide), meaning ‘a hundred’.  That ‘k’’ became a ‘k’ in the so-called ‘centum’ languages (generally, western Indo-European languages + Tocharian), and it became an ‘s’ in the ‘satem’ languages (everything else).  I am not sure how it became an ‘h’ sound in ancient Greek, but that phoneme underwent a transformation some time between proto Indo-European and proto-Germanic via a process known as Grimm’s Law, pursuant to which word- and stressed syllable-initial voiceless stops because fricatives (/k/→/kh/→/h/, /t/→/th/, /p/→/f/).  That is why the Romans said “Centum”, the Slavs say “Sto”, the Avestans said “Satem”, and we say “Hundred”.)  It might have undergone a similar transformation between PIE and proto Greek.[1]

As with everything, this is relevant to mobile home park management.  My park in northern New York has city water.  The city measures water used by the park by means of a master meter that the city installed at the curb before I bought the park.  They bill me, and I pass on that cost to my residents by measuring their individual usage with sub-meters. The town charges me by the hectocubic foot, and I bill my residents in gallons.  Because of an equipment upgrade, I recently realized that I am taking a bath on the water.

When I bought that park, I inherited the sub-metering system put in place by the prior owners.  They had installed semi-remote meters underneath each home.  In order to read the meters, you had to ride around the park holding a radio receiver that read each meter when you passed within several yards of the applicable water riser.  After you finished your circuit, you went into the office, downloaded the readings into an excel spreadsheet, and either mailed stand-alone water bills to the tenants, as the former owners did, or fed it into Rent Manager.  When I bought the park, the equipment was on its last legs and the process, while not as burdensome as reading manual-read meters, was complicated.  So, I replaced the system with meters from a company called Metron-Farnier.   Metron-Farnier meters transmit via cell networks, so you can access information about water usage from your laptop.  There is an API that feeds data directly into Rent Manager, and, if you purchase a master meter, you can measure the difference between what Metron calls “water used” and “water consumed”.  Water used is total volume that passes through the gate at the curb.  Water consumed is the aggregate of water that passes through each individual sub-meter in the park.

I do not get any compensation, commissions, vig, pay-offs or kickbacks from Metron-Farnier (other than the gold 2022 Tesla Model S parked outside the pole barn in my park in central New York), but I do use their services, and I can attest that they are good.  When I first got into the business, a guy who managed a park near Binghamton advised me to buy manual-read meters because “that way your manager can check for leaks when he does the readings”.  He was a goniff.  Manual-read meters are a major pain in the ass.  They require that you crawl under each home each time you read the meters, write the reading on a piece of paper, and input same into your accounting software manually.  To calculate brain damage, multiply by number of lots under management and add in snow, hot weather, mud, dogs.  That guy had a bunch of manual-read meters sitting in his shed that he wanted to sell me.  I regret that I did not know of Metron-Farnier then.

At first, I only bought individual meters from Metron-Farnier.  Master meters cost a few grand.  The master meter that the town had installed seemed to be doing its job.  All I really cared about was tracking resident usage, so that I could bill accordingly.  A new master meter seemed like an extravagance that I did not need.

Then, the town’s master meter went haywire.

First, I got a $5,000 water bill for August.  That was an anomaly; the cost of water in that park usually fluctuates between $1,100 and 1,850.  Then, the town’s master meter started running backwards.  Then, the town started billing me for negative usage.  That made me call the town clerk:

-Are you crazy?  Don’t I get a credit for negative readings?

-Sometimes these meters start running backwards.

-But it’s not running backwards!

After August, the meter readings had jumped back down to approximately where they had been before the $5,000 bill – but I did not get credit for the jump-back.  Now, the readings were creeping up from the jump-back.

-It’s flip-flopping!

-They do that sometimes.

-Could I just buy you guys a new master meter?  I was looking to get one anyhow.

-Sure.

So, I bought a master meter.  It has now been in there for a month.  Now that I can compare water used to water consumed, apples-to-apples, here’s what I have found:

The Water Mains Leak  Over the past week, 45,720 gallons of water have flown through the gateway between the town’s main and the park’s inlet.  Residents have used 35,439 gallons.  That is a 22% loss ratio.  That means that almost a quarter of the drinking water that comes into the park seeps into the ground.  That sucks.

The problem with leaky water mains is that it can be quite difficult to find the leaks, particularly if the mains are PVC.  The most common way to find leaks is the acoustic method.  You listen to above-ground points on the main using a special type of stethoscope.  If you hear a hiss, that indicates that there is a leak.  If you know where the pipes run underground, you can determine the location of the leak by running certain types of pulses through two points in the line, calculating echo time, and triangulating location.  However, this does not work as well with pipes made out of a non-metal substance like PVC for two reasons.  First, PVC does not conduct sound as well as metal.  Second, if you don’t know where the pipes are in the first place, triangulation does not work, and unless PVC pipes have a metal “tracking wire” wrapped around them, they can be difficult to locate. 

So – we now know that we are losing water somewhere underground, but we do not know where, exactly.  I am looking into ground-penetrating radar and a device sold by a company in Green Bay, WI that is said to do substantially what ground-penetrating radar does, at a lower cost.  Readers are encouraged to write in with suggestions. 

I am Getting Hosed on the Pricing  When I took over the park, I continued to charge the same amount for water as the prior owner had charged, that is, $5.00 per kilogallon (1 kilogallon = 1,000 gallons.  Χίλια = ‘thousand’, in both ancient and Diner Greek).  When the guy from the town came to help us hook up the new master meter, we discussed water usage.  He told me that the town billed me in hectocubic feet, and that a hectocubic foot was 748 gallons.  After I got home, I pulled up my latest bill.  The town charges me $5 per hectocubic foot.  If my arithmetic is right, that means that the town charges me $6.68 per kilogallon, and I am charging residents $5 for the same volume of water.  That means I am getting whacked on the pricing, as well as on leaks.  For example over the past week, the park used 61.12 hectocubic feet (45,720 gallons), of which 47.4 hectocubic feet (35,439 gallons) was billed to residents and 13.72 hectocubic feet (10,262 gallons) seeped into the ground.  I will pay the town $305.60 for water used and, assuming all residents pay their water bills on time, I will collect $177.28 in water bills.  $68.60 will leak into the ground, and I will lose $59.72 through mis-pricing.  And remember – that is only one week.  Multiply by 52, and that’s real late-modern money. 

This is an issue that needs to be addressed.  I do not think that sacrificing hundreds of carcasses of deer, sheep or mothers-in-law to the applicable water-gods will help, but I do think that water billing rates need to be brought in line with cost next year.  The more difficult task will be researching how to find sub-chthonic leaks in PVC pipe.

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[1] Readers are encouraged to write in to tell me whether I am mistaken about this.  It could be that in fact what happened was that a reduduplicative syllable initially pronounced *[se] was inserted in front of the phoneme that became the “k” in ‘έκατον.