an article from sunsonic®
Most people wait until a meter fails before replacing it. But mechanical meters rarely fail spectacularly. They degrade slowly, quietly—and while they’re still spinning, they're draining your budget in ways that often slip under the radar. These are the costs you don’t see on a balance sheet... until you look closer.
Mechanical meters lose accuracy over time, especially at lower flows. That might not seem urgent—until you realize that small inaccuracies compounded across hundreds or thousands of connections add up to serious revenue loss. Especially in residential or mixed-use areas, these meters can underreport by 5–15% after years of use. With ultrasonic meters, accuracy stays high over the long term, thanks to their non-contact technology or, in other words, lack of moving parts.
Every time a team is dispatched to read a meter, troubleshoot a drop in performance, or replace a worn part, you’re spending on labor, fuel, and lost productivity elsewhere. Imagine a pile of money on fire. Multiply that by dozens—or hundreds—of service calls per year, and you’ve got a hidden labor sink. A properly deployed ultrasonic system, especially with non-invasive clamp-on designs, can eliminate many of those field visits entirely. Fewer site visits = more efficient operations.
Mechanical meters can't tell you when something unusual happens—they just record totals, and it’s someone’s responsibility to interpret the data to understand if something’s wrong. This is the most miserable puzzle ever. Ultrasonic meters, especially those integrated with analytics platforms, can alert of any unusual flow signatures that indicate leaks, line breaks, or customer-side issues. In many systems, this kind of insight leads to early intervention, helping reduce non-revenue water and infrastructure strain before the problem gets worse.
Slow data gives you slow insights. Real-time data gives you leverage. If your metering strategy relies on manual reads and slow data, you're flying blind. And when you're blind, you overcompensate by over-engineering capacity, over-ordering supply, or over-budgeting for maintenance. Ultrasonic water meters offer frequent or real-time data, enabling usage pattern recognition, load balancing, and proactive system optimization.
Maybe your meters aren’t broken. But keeping them means deferring efficiency, accuracy, and insight. Every year you delay an upgrade is another year of operating below potential—another year you can’t spot serious issues early, can’t automate reads, can’t make smarter infrastructure decisions. There’s a real cost to waiting—and it increases with time.
No one budgets for inefficiency. But every aging mechanical left in service is a tiny leak in your system’s performance. The best time to modernize was probably three years ago. The second-best time is now.
