I have honestly never been so relieved to find out the city can charge me anything they want without me knowing. I never even thought to use the city water meter to measure water flow, mine has no display whatsoever, just a radio transmitter to the little locked box on the side of the house, with another radio presumably used to transmit the collected data to the truck that drives by to ‘read’ the meters.
That could have been quite embarrassing for me, but it is quite useful to those that have a display on their meter. I would bet at least a few people would overlook it as a reliable water flow meter, provided, free of charge to most residences in or near a city. I’ll also be calling my utility to ask about potentially having one I could monitor installed.
So anyway thanks for, perhaps unknowingly, enlightening me to another source of data for my sprinklers 😀