How does the water company track water usage at a single family home, and what stops a homeowner from adding a bypass around said measuring unit?
In: Engineering
There’s a [water meter](https://www.waterone.org/home/showpublishedimage/3428/637520289381870000) located on the pipe leading from the water main to the house. It measures waterflow through it.
What stops a homeowner from adding a bypass is
a) that would be fraud or theft (I’m not exactly sure which it would fall under) and you would wind up in legal trouble if you were caught
b) Depending on where the meter is it may not be a trivial piece of plumbing to do.
It depends, in places where there is a water meter (which measures the amount of water that has gone into your house) someone will check the amount monthly and charge you accordingly, with some being electronic and being more automatic. Tampering with such meters is basically fraud and illegal.
In places where there aren’t water meters for each household then the total consumption of a given area is measured instead and then it’s divided for each household, with some places also giving approximations on how much one particular household should be using based on residents (so you charge more if the house has 6 residents compared to 1 resident)
On the water line in to your house, there will be a water meter. It measures how much goes through it. This meter also has a small radio device that can communicate with the upstream office, typically through a relay in a utility box in the neighborhood.
You *could* bypass it, but if your water usage suddenly drops, they will notice and come to inspect the meter.
There’s a meter on the intake valve by your home. Once a month, someone will drive by, take a reading, and then you get charged accordingly. You theoretically could install a bypass, but there’s usually no valve before the meter, meaning you’d be working with active pipes full of high-pressure water.
The device would immediately detect a drop in pressure when you disconnect it while installing the bypass. The water company would send someone to inspect it and you’d be found out pretty quickly.
I lived in an abandoned house for about 4 months and our water meter was missing, just a capped off pipe in the garden bed. My housemate managed to uncap the main, attach a hose that had a garden tap fixed at one end and we had free running water until the house got knocked down.
Somebody from the water company even came to check the meter and couldn’t find it…he was surprised by the whole thing and had a “not my job” attitude, just warned us that our landlord might be dodgy and that we should take care.
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