The Island That Makes Its Water

Canary Detect, The Leaky Finders, on why they have spent the last 12 months teaching a machine to understand Lanzarote’s water, and why they are now giving a good chunk of it away for free.

There are no rivers on Lanzarote. No lakes, no meaningful aquifers, no reservoir in the hills waiting for winter. Every drop that comes out of a tap here has a more impressive CV than most of us: born in the Atlantic, dragged through a desalination plant, pushed through a membrane at enormous pressure, remineralised, chlorinated, quality-checked to EU standards, and piped across a volcanic island. Lanzarote does not collect its water. It manufactures it.

And then somebody’s spare toilet runs all night like it is training for something.

That is what waste means here. On the mainland, a running toilet is an annoyance. On Lanzarote, it is a small industrial product, made at real cost, being poured directly into a drain while everyone is asleep. After years finding leaks for more than 1,200 property owners, we can tell you exactly where the island’s water goes missing: underground, at night, and in properties where nobody is home.

So we did something unusual for a leak detection company. We built artificial intelligence and taught it this island’s water, drop by drop. In the end we built two, because it turned out to be a family business in more ways than one.

Meet Arthur

His name is Arthur, and he is nothing like the chatbots you have played with. Ask a generic AI about your Lanzarote water bill and it will confidently explain how water billing works somewhere else entirely, possibly Swindon. It will do this with total self-belief and zero shame. Confidently wrong is worse than useless when there is money involved.

Arthur is different because of what we fed him. Months of it: both billers’ tariffs, Aguas de Lanzarote y La Graciosa and Club Lanzarote, every price block, the sewerage rules, and that mysterious “Diferencia contador general” line that has ruined more Sunday mornings than cheap wine. All of it checked to the cent against real island bills. Ask him what 30 cubic metres costs and he will not estimate. He will build your bill line by line, the way it actually prints, like a man who has read the tariff so you never have to. Because he has. He may be the only one who enjoyed it.

Arthur works out front, in public, for the whole island. But the family has a second member, and she does not do out front.

Meet Aunt Polly, on the books inside LeakGuard

Twelve months ago we started building LeakGuard, The Leaky Finders’ very own protection racket: it watches your property day and night, and the only thing it ever shakes down is your water meter. It is a small, self-powered device installed at the meter, with its own SIM card, quietly logging how a property drinks.

Inside that dashboard is Aunt Polly, and she keeps the books. Where Arthur knows the island’s tariffs, Aunt Polly knows your home: she reads its actual live meter, down to the fifteen-minute mark, so every LeakGuard customer can interrogate their own home’s live data. Was anything running overnight? What is this month costing so far? Is that spike a leak, or the pool top-up? She does not guess. She checks the ledger, because on this house nothing gets past her.

We built LeakGuard to catch leaks, and it does. Its very first alert found a hidden leak with no visible signs at all, one that would otherwise have run merrily along for two months until the bill arrived to break the news.

But the thing that has genuinely surprised us is everything else it catches, because a water meter cannot lie and apparently neither can anyone who touches one. We have caught taps left running. We have caught a pool cleaner’s hose still going strong long after the van had gone, presumably enjoying its independence. We have caught toilets passing water all night with the quiet dedication of an endurance athlete. And just last week, LeakGuard flagged a faulty aljibe, a storage tank that had decided to fill itself when it had no business filling, like a fridge that orders its own milk. None of these were “leaks” in the traditional sense. All of them were manufactured water, wasted, and every one was stopped within days instead of surfacing two months later as a bill that reads like a ransom note.

We keep a live demo home open to the public, no login, no sign-up, so anyone can wander round a real LeakGuard dashboard, meet Aunt Polly at work, and see all of this for themselves: leakguard-manager.com/demo.

And now, the Garrison: Arthur for everyone

Aunt Polly looks after the homes that have LeakGuard fitted. What about everyone else? That is Arthur’s department, and from today it is free for the whole island: Garrison HQ, at canary-detect.com/garrison-hq.

The Garrison is a set of free water tools with Arthur running the place:

• Check a bill and have every line explained in plain English.
• Upload a photo of your bill and have it checked against the official tariff, line by line, no judgement.
• Work out what your pool holds and what filling it costs, to the price block.
• And the newest tool: find out exactly what your pool should have lost to evaporation, from the real weather.

The tools are already saving people money. Users checking their bills have discovered they were being charged on the holiday-let tariff when their home is fully residential, which is an expensive mistake to be making every two months, because the tourist rate pays a premium from the very first cubic metre. Ten minutes with Arthur, one call to the biller, sorted.

The newest tool is the one we are proudest of. Every pool owner on Lanzarote has asked the same question: my pool has dropped, is that normal? You can ask a Facebook group, of course, where you will receive eleven contradictory answers, one argument about a different topic entirely, and a lecture from a family who do not own a pool because they bathe in rock pools at dawn with a shepherd called Mateo.

Or you can ask a machine that has read the weather. The Garrison’s pool evaporation calculator pulls the real recorded weather for your own town, hour by hour, wind, humidity and air pressure, and works out exactly what your pool should have lost in any week you choose. The results genuinely surprise people. A pool here can lose more than 1,000 litres a week to evaporation alone. It loses more on a windy night than a sunny afternoon, because a pool barely cools overnight and it is the wind, not the sun, that steals the water. The same pool loses noticeably different amounts in Playa Blanca and Costa Teguise in the same week. It even accounts for your pool cover, and, crucially, for when you actually bother putting it on. It knows. We are sorry.

Then comes the part that matters. Tell it how far your level really fell and it gives you a straight answer: the weather explains it, or something else is taking your water.

Pool cleaners of Lanzarote: the tool is free, and frankly, you are welcome.

A straight answer on why it’s free

Because informed owners waste less, and on an island that has to make every litre, that matters to everyone who lives here, us included. And honestly? Because if the calculator tells you the weather cannot explain your pool, or Arthur spots a bill that looks like a leak, we hope we are the people you call. Finding leaks is the family business, on a simple promise: no find, no fee. There it is. That is the whole scheme. We are telling you the plan and giving you the tools anyway.

It helps that the paperwork behind us is solid. Aguas de Lanzarote y La Graciosa and Club Lanzarote are the only two water companies on this island, and Canary Detect is recognised by both: formally recognised by Aguas de Lanzarote y La Graciosa as an authorised installer, and an approved installer with Club Lanzarote. That first one matters more than it sounds. If a hidden leak has inflated your bill, you may be entitled to a reduction of up to 50%, and the claim can only be processed when the repair is carried out by an authorised installer and submitted with their official reference. Ours carries it, and it took the best part of two years of Spanish regulatory bureaucracy to get, which we now regard as a form of endurance sport.

Everything at the Garrison is free, in English and Spanish, works on your phone, no sign-up, nothing saved. Meet Arthur at canary-detect.com/garrison-hq, see Aunt Polly at work at leakguard-manager.com/demo, and if the numbers point to a leak, you know who to call.

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Canary Detect · The Leaky Finders

canary-detect.com · 911 98 57 05 · No find, no fee

Free water tools: canary-detect.com/garrison-hq · Live demo: leakguard-manager.com/demo

We are The Leaky Finders.