There is a long, thin, rubber-y line wrapped around/connected to the water line pictured below.
Other angle:
The piece in question is loosely hanging via a zip tie on my main water line about shoulder height and can be moved up/down easily.
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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What is this thing?
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It's a device that allows your township to record water usage remotely(that's why it's got an FCC id). Without it, the meter would either need to be on the outside of the house or you'd need to let the meter reader into your house monthly to record the usage.
They send someone around every month to check the water meter? That’s crazy. Why would they do that?
Here I only have to report my water meter’s numbers once a year and that’s self reported. They send me an email and I just enter the numbers on their website and that’s it. I don’t think I ever hand anyone from the water company look at the meter in the 18 years I’ve lived here.
I did get a random water quality test once though.
We used to have meter readers (people) in the 90's. I remember having to shovel paths for them through the snow.
They send someone every month here. A guy comes down the street looking at all the meters (they are under metal plates in front yards) and putting info into a phone. I guess the city has an app. He has a metal pry bar with a long handle he uses to open them
So you pay the actual use for each month?
Yes, the city bundles water, sewer, and garbage pickup, recycling and bills monthly.
It’s not the true actual usage. The water usage is recorded directly by the meter and should be accurate but sewage usage is not metered at all. They just assume that all the water you use will end up down the drain or down a toilet in your house so they bill you for the exact same volume of both sewage and water. This can get very far out of whack if you’re using a lot of water outdoors (filling up a swimming pool, watering your garden, washing your car, pressure washing for outdoor cleanup, etc).
For the pool you can generally inform the water/sewer department(s) of that and request an exemption. They'll usually use your average water consumption as your sewer bill for that month.
For ongoing usage that doesn't enter the sewer, such as irrigation, you can often request a second meter be installed, for which sewage isn't billed.
Oh that’s really interesting! Thanks for the info!
My municipality charges a flat rate for sewer and use rate for water.
Yes and I used to have a well at one house I lived in, and they didn't charge me for water or sewer because of what you say here, they didn't have a way to measure it since I wasn't buying water.
If you go up to one of those covers and look at it, you'll probably find that the meter well is using a nonstandard bolt head (often five-sided) in an effort to prevent tampering. I bet that used to work a lot better before people could just buy any weird tool they wanted on Amazon (though I wonder if anyone cares now that water is such a tiny fraction of most people's monthly budgets).
In the 1990s, we used to live next to a couple, Julio & Georgina. They would fight all the time, screaming in Spanish. We never really talked to them. One month we couldn't pay our water bill and the guy came and shut it off.
As the truck pulled away from the curb, Julio EXPLODES from his house, screaming cusses in Spanish with the biggest wrench I have ever seen. Turns my water back on, shakes the massive wrench at the retreating truck, still yelling at them, nods at me and stomps back into his house.
That's amazing. Definitely one of those Chaotic neighbors you want to be on the good side of.
Yes, you get billed for water just like electricity and gas. Depending where you live it could be a bill every 3-6 months, or monthly. The western US is has a lot of desert and water is much more expensive than in wetter areas. Their bills are typically higher and more heavily tracked. If you have a leak you wouldn’t know for a couple months, having that happen in a water scarce area would be less than ideal for a customer.
I remember thinking the exact same thing, just the other way around, when I moved to the UK. I went from a country that measured what you used and billed you for it, to a country that just kinda went "oh, you're a family of 3? We'll charge you for... I dunno, like this much water? How's that sound?"
In the US, water is often supplied by the city, and there isn't really a "flat fee" like in the Netherlands (I'm just assuming we're both Dutch, since I've never seen a non Dutch feddit.nl user).
In the Netherlands we pay something like 100 euros plus 1 euro per liter, and a fixed price for sewage based on inhabitants.
The the US, payment for metered water are without a fixed fee or with a very low one. In Seattle you something like 25 USD, plus ~6 USD per 100 cubic feet, (2.25 per cubic meter). But you also pay something like 18 USD per 100cubic feet of water in sewerage costs. So really, your water bill is around 8 bucks per cubic meter.
And many cities in warmer places have winter and summer pricing for water and sewage. So for a 3 person household using between 50% and 150% of average, that's between 40 and 100 USD per month depending on use.
For a Dutch household, the bill for that same household would vary between 5 and 13 euros per month, since the rest is flat. So nobody really cares if you're off by 25%.
Yep. My dad used to manage a water utility in the 90s, right around the time that they were experimenting with different means of monitoring flow for billing.
The way they had been doing it for decades was by sending a person to literally, physically open every meter well (using a special wrench that opened the five-sided nut closing the well, in an effort to prevent homeowners from tampering with it) and reading the meter usage visually each month, writing the amount down on a paper sheet that would then be manually entered into a billing program on the computer later.
That was supplanted by a version with a very short range radio transmitter. The reader would tap the cover with a probe, and the probe handle would display the value, which was again written on a paper sheet. This got rid of the need to physically open every well, but as I remember it never actually rolled out to every customer even in the entire company before the next version: a slightly longer range transmitter that the reader could scan without leaving the truck. But again, the value was written on paper and input manually.
My dad changed jobs before they upgraded that one so that it saved the value to internal memory, allowing a reader to just drive past every customer's house and read every meter without stopping. My understanding is that that version was eventually replaced with something more like the one in OP's image, which would transmit the value back to the billing office and generate a bill automatically without needing anyone to even come within range of it or see the number at all.
Though, that said, once I became a homeowner, I've noticed meter readers physically opening the meter well and visually inspecting it. I don't see any way they could possibly be actually recording the number (they don't get nearly close enough), so I have to assume they're using a different method to get the number and just performing visual checks to make sure the meter isn't tampered with.
Same here, not in NL.
We do had somebody come check when we contacted them because we were paying too much. (After which we received 1300 euro back because we definitely were)
Nowadays most people in my country have the required "smart meter" now though.