[LeRoySmith]

I've had some direct experience with water meters from the providers side of the equation. One of my first real jobs was being the grunt at a small municipality water department. My primary duty was replacing meters that had stopped working and investigating high water consumption complaints. My learning from that job was meters don't typically make errors in the utilities favor. If a meter malfunctions its because the innards get gummed up or worn and actually under report the amount of water that has passed thorough them. I replaced or repaired many meters that had been in place for decades and the bill always went up, because the new meter was more accurate than the old worn one. I'd say 90% of my investigation results were faulty toilets, either a leaky flapper of a malfunctioning flush valve. The other 10% were kids leaving the hose running, a broken pipe after the meter or a sink dripping. I suspect there were several cases where the homeowner left the water running somewhere but they rarely admitted it.

Meter readers do occasionally make errors, reading meters was another of my duties at the water dept., but those errors work themselves out on the next billing cycle. I think the majority of large water works use remote readers these days so the reading errors should drop significantly.