Water company can measure the water that leaves their pumping station(s) - just put a flow meter on the one big pipe. If that doesn’t match the sum of all their customer meters, then water is going somewhere else - broken pipe, illegal connection, meter fraud, whatever.
I would guess that most jurisdictions already have that one big flow meter, because they have to comply with water rights agreements, have to know how much chlorine & fluoride to inject, etc.
If that doesn’t match the sum of all their customer meters, then water is going somewhere else
That’s probably exactly what they did, but usually the water meter at customers is only measured or reported on once per year, so it takes months before the difference becomes clear in the data.
Maybe they do commercial customers different, but I’m about 30 miles north of the site in question, and my water use is reported in real time. I can even get a daily report from their web site. It’s hard to believe they’d be less interested in the usage of their 1e6-gallon-per-year commercial customers than their 1e4-gallon-per-year residential customers.
Water company can measure the water that leaves their pumping station(s) - just put a flow meter on the one big pipe. If that doesn’t match the sum of all their customer meters, then water is going somewhere else - broken pipe, illegal connection, meter fraud, whatever.
I would guess that most jurisdictions already have that one big flow meter, because they have to comply with water rights agreements, have to know how much chlorine & fluoride to inject, etc.
That’s probably exactly what they did, but usually the water meter at customers is only measured or reported on once per year, so it takes months before the difference becomes clear in the data.
Maybe they do commercial customers different, but I’m about 30 miles north of the site in question, and my water use is reported in real time. I can even get a daily report from their web site. It’s hard to believe they’d be less interested in the usage of their 1e6-gallon-per-year commercial customers than their 1e4-gallon-per-year residential customers.