Reading my Water Meter

Installation

On November 21, 2013 we had an Elster C700 water meter installed in our house at 100 Prince Street in Charlottetown under the city's Volunteer Meter Program.

Installation was quick and done at no cost by city staff and when it was complete it looked like this:

Electronic Reading Transmitter

Attached to the meter is a grey box called an ERT -- electronic reading transmitter -- made by iTron. This is used by the city to read the meter from the road.

The grey box has the following identifying marks on it:

FCC ID E096OW
IC ID: 864D-60W

12/07/12  14
60W-R
ELSTER AMCO PROTOCOL

Reading the Meter On-Site

The city has a helpful guide to reading the meter that contains this graphic:

Sample Reading

After installation I took this photo of the meter:

The next morning, after flushing the toilet several times, having a shower (with a 1.6 gallon-per-minute showerhead newly installed) and brushing my teeth, I took another photo:

The first reading was approximately 2.47, the second was approximately 8.61, meaning the different was 6.14, or 61.4 litres of water consumed.

The city charges $0.844/cubic metre for water consumption. 61.4 litres is 0.0614 cubic metres, meaning that it cost me 5.2 cents for my morning wake-up water today.

Can I Read the Meter Digitally?

Based on what I've read here and here, and here it seems like as long as our ERT box is configured to be in "bubble-up mode", then we can, in theory, read our own data from it.

My project now is to figure out the most cost-effective way of doing this.