Napier City Council looks set to be the first council in Hawke’s Bay to install water meters, with money allocated in its Long Term Plan to bring them in some time between 2029 and 2034.
The project to install water meters to support leak detection and enhance system monitoring has a budget set aside of $2 million to $5 million.
But Hastings is holding fire on any such commitment for the time being, even though a trial in the district has already helped stop tens of thousands of litres of water leaking out of broken pipes.
A total of 2000 electronic water meters were installed by Hastings council teams in 2023 on council tobies across Hastings, Havelock North, Flaxmere, Bridge Pa and Pakipaki over summer to gather information on water use and leaks.
In about 20 cases, the losses were between 10,000 and 30,000 litres a day, and the property owners either had no idea about the leak or it appeared so small as not to be a concern.
Contact with those owners had been prioritised by the team, with the issues either fixed or in the process of being fixed.
Hastings Mayor Sandra Hazlehurst said getting this information through the technology provided the community with a strong incentive to have a conversation about universal water meters, in the context of water certainty.
“Our community knows how valuable water is and how much we have invested in treating and storing it to ensure our people have access to safe drinking water. To have so much of it leaking into the ground undetected is concerning.”
But Hastings council has no plans to install more meters across the district at this point.
Council three waters manager Steve Cave said the data collected while specific to the metered properties, was being used to help model trends and provide average use and potential leak levels across the network – both on the Council and private side of the meters.
“However, any network-wide conclusions need to be treated cautiously, given they are based on a limited number of connections,” Cave said.
He said the meters had confirmed issues that could not be proven without this technology.
“The meters have enabled us to pinpoint issues that have not been visible – leaks under houses, or streets, leaks that go undetected because they go down the drains in our kitchens, bathrooms and laundries, barely noticed.
“It has long been known that with aging pipes across New Zealand, leaks that are obvious at road level or within houses are only a small part of the water-loss problem. This data gives us an idea of just how big the issue might be.”
A Hastings council spokesperson said it installed what it could with the funding available for the trial, to gather the information it was targeting.
“Expanding the monitoring programme would require a specific funding decision.”
They said the relatively small number of meters were installed to help the council understand residential water use patterns and to gather broad-brush information on the likelihood/level of undetected and below-ground leaks in the network.
“Expanding water meters and charging would require a decision by Council, substantial funding and a community conversation.”
In a brief statement about Napier’s water meter plans, Deputy Mayor Annette Brosnan said they were a helpful tool for the Napier community to understand its water use better.
By Linda Hall, Local Democracy Reporter
LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
