Water Quality Measurement

Gathering actionable data to inform our short- and long-term conservation efforts

Total cost: $12,000

In order to understand how best to protect and improve Timber Lake’s water quality over time, the first step is to enhance our regular measurement of several important water equality and weather metrics.

Metrics will be beneficial to us in many ways both short-term and long-term. They will point out present problems to address. They will help us understand the impact of changes and actions we take. They will help us spot future threats early on. They will help us identify the sources of pollutants and sediment, the makeup of the sediment, and the rate at which it is coming into the lake.

This information will be invaluable as we make decisions about such things as dredging timelines, opportunities for community education,  decisions and recommendations about sewer issues, evaluation of invasive plants, and wildlife challenges.

For the past several years, Toni Sobleskie Ballagh, a lake resident, has organized and conducted monthly water testing for ten sites on the lake.  Using a team of volunteers and a home laboratory, she has monitored the pH of the water and the presence of e.Coli.  Additionally, she has done special testing during high water events, as e.Coli levels rise significantly during these times. Thanks, Toni!

We intend to add significantly to our monitoring by purchasing equipment and developing a water quality database.  This will enable us to measure several additional meaningful indicators of water quality and correlate it with the increasingly severe water level rises that occur during heavy rains.

Working with water quality experts at University of Lynchburg and Liberty University, we have identified the following metrics that we will initially begin to measure and record in late 2025.

  • Rainfall and temperature

  • Water Levels in our three creeks

  • E. Coli

  • pH

  • Phosphorus

  • Water clarity

  • Chlorophyll A

  • Suspended solids


The equipment we will purchase includes a professional weather station to measure rainfall, temperature and humidity; water level monitoring devices for each of our creeks; a flow meter; and water temperature devices at three depths. Additionally, the University of Lynchburg has donated to us a device to measure Chlorophyll content.  Finally, we will contract with a laboratory to do regular analysis of phosphorus and suspended solids.

We will institute procedures to regularly extract data from devices and lab reports and enter it into a custom database we will build. Once we have an appropriate amount of historical data, we will contract with professionals to develop an analytical approach that we can do ourselves.

The projected cost of this project is:

$8,000 for equipment
$2,000 per year for laboratory processing
$2,000 for consulting

Please consider helping us buy the equipment and services essential to monitoring the quality of our lake’s water!