Tauranga City Council - Water meter renewal modelling

Tauranga City Council (TCC) adopted and implemented universal water metering in the early 2000’s. The experiences and outcomes of doing so are discussed in detail in J Sternberg’s paper ”Water Metering – the Tauranga Journey”.

Around 39,000 of their fleet of 50,000 water meters have now been in service for nearly a decade. As the fleet of water meters ages, TCC wish to supplement their existing reactive meter replacement program with a proactive program to effectively manage these assets, and to protect the associated revenue stream.

It is well documented that as water meters age, they tend to under-record the volume of water passing through them. MWH has worked with TCC to develop a model which performs the calculations necessary to estimate the ongoing financial cost of this under-recording (known as under-registration), and balance it against the capital costs of replacing meters. The main model output is a meter renewal program.

This paper outlines the requirements, processes and outputs of the model, and presents the results of testing of the first batch of meters replaced according to the model results.