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Calculate Your Water Use

How to read your water meter and calculate your usage

Step1: Read your water meter

Example water meter
  • Locate the water meter for your property - if you are unable to find it, please contact Council.
  • Carefully open the water meter box lid and remove any obstructions - you may need to brush away some dirt and please be careful of insects or small reptiles.
  • Not all meters look the same. A series of dials are located below the engraved meter number. There may or may not be a small lid to open to see the dials.
  • The dials have numbers on them which is used to count the number of litres being used by the property. The white dials with the black digits located on the left represent kilolitres and the red dials with the white digits on the right represent litres. 1000 litres equals 1 kilolitre.
  • If the red dials are moving it means that water is being used by the property. This could be an appliance like a washing machine. If no water is being used in the house, it could be a leak.
  • Read the digits from left to right.
  • Please ensure you have 3 red digits, If you do not please add a 0 at the end.

It is a good idea to read your meter weekly as this is more representative of general household use.  For example, you may use less on a week day if you only do laundry on the weekends.

Step 2: Calculating Usage

A working example...

Read the water meter one morning. The meter may read as ... 1953 (black digits) 805 (red digits).  

Read the meter at approximately the same time on the same day the following week. The meter may read as ...1955 (black digits) 807 (red digits).

This means that the property has used 2 kilolitres and 2 litres which is the equivalent of 2002 litres for that week. To get this figure you deduct the first meter read from the second meter read.  In this example that would be 1955807 (meter read week 1) -1953805 (meter read week 2) =2002 litres

To find out the average daily use for your household, a couple more calculations are required.

  • First, 2002 litres needs to be divided by the number of days between meter reads – in this case, the number of days is 7 (e.g. Monday to Monday): 2002 litres divided by 7 days = 286 litres used each day.
  • Next, divide the number of litres used each day by the number of people living in the house.  If you have 3 people living in the house it would be: 286 (litres used each day) divided by 3 (number of people in the house) = 95.3 litres being used by each person in the house each day.
Content Editor

Calculate your usage

Previous Meter Reading:  



Current Meter Reading:  



Days Between Readings:



Number Of People At Residence:

 


 Water Reading Example2



 

Average Litres Used Per Person Per Day:

 



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