A meter that is not connected to anything reads the same number for ever. This one is in a chamber under a field, on a main that was cut and capped, and it has gone up by about eleven cubic metres a year for twenty nine years.
I read meters for a water company. Twenty three years, mostly rural, which means a van and a lot of gates.
Most meters are read remotely now, but there is a long tail that is not, either because the signal is no good or because nobody has been round to upgrade them, and the long tail is my job.
The one in this story is number 4412 on my route.
It is in a chamber in the corner of a field, under a cast iron cover with the old authority's initials on it, the ones that stopped existing in 1989.
The chamber is about a metre deep and it has a meter in it on a two inch main.
The main is cut and capped, thirty centimetres past the meter, with a proper spade end and a weld. I have had the cover off perhaps sixty times and I have had my hand on that cap.
It goes up.
Not much. Between nine and thirteen cubic metres a year, which is eleven thousand litres, which is about what one person uses in three months.
I have twenty three years of my own readings and the company has readings before that going back to 1996, when the meter was installed.
It has never gone down and it has never jumped. It creeps.
What was at the far end of the main.
A pumping station. A small one, a brick building with a pump and a chlorinator that served four farms and a hamlet before everything went on the ring main.
It came down in 1996 and the site was cleared and the main was cut and capped at both ends, which is why the meter was installed at all: it was put in during the decommissioning to prove the leg was dead.
I have read the decommissioning file. It is in the depot in a cabinet nobody opens. The last page is a signed statement that the leg was isolated, cut, capped and pressure tested to zero, and that a meter had been fitted for monitoring.
The next line, in a different hand, dated eleven months later, says meter reading 0.9, investigate.
What has been done about it since, which is more than I expected.
Investigated in 1998 and no fault found.
The meter replaced in 2003. Same.
Replaced again in 2014 with a modern one, and this time somebody with more authority than me insisted on a pressure test of the capped leg at the same time.
The leg holds no pressure. It is at atmospheric, which is what a capped and drained pipe does. The test certificate is in the file.
The meter has gone up by a hundred and twenty cubic metres since that certificate was signed.
The impeller.
I know how these fail, because a meter reading high is the commonest complaint in this industry.
Air. A meter will spin on air, and a leg being drained or refilled can put a lot of air through one. But air comes in a burst and this creeps, and there has been nothing to drain since 1996.
The register. A register can be misread by a person, which is why my readings are photographed now, and I have photographs of every one since 2016. The digits go up.
Vibration. A meter shaken hard enough can advance a fraction. There is nothing there to shake it. It is a field with sheep in it.
The eleven cubic metres.
I worked out, one afternoon, because I had a long lunch and a piece of paper, what eleven cubic metres a year is as a rate.
It is about thirty litres a day. Which is a tap running for two minutes, or a toilet flushed four times, or one person washing.
That is the number I have not been able to put down for twenty three years, because it is not a leak rate and it is not an instrument error rate. It is a household rate for a very small household.
The site.
There is nothing there. The pumping station's footprint is under grass and you can find it by the way the grass goes in a dry summer, which is how you find anything that has been built on.
I have walked it. There is a rectangle about seven metres by five, and inside the rectangle there is a smaller darker rectangle which the farmer says was the chlorine store.
In the corner of the bigger rectangle there is a patch about a metre across where the grass is greener rather than paler, all year, and I have stood on it in August when the rest of the field was straw.
Greener means wetter.
What I do with the reading.
I write it down. It goes into the handheld and it uploads with the rest of the route and it lands in a database.
It is not billed to anybody, because there is no customer against it. It sits in a category the system calls unallocated consumption and it is one of about four hundred entries in that category across the region, most of which are standpipes and building sites.
Once a year the whole category is written off in the water balance as distribution losses, and eleven cubic metres in a regional figure measured in millions is nothing at all, and nobody will ever look at it.
I still read it, every May, because it is on the route and because a meter on a route gets read.
And I have started doing one thing I did not used to do, which is that I lift the cover, take the photograph, and put the cover back before I write the number down, instead of leaving the chamber open while I do the paperwork on my knee.
The chamber is a metre deep and there is a meter in it and a capped pipe and nothing else, and I have looked in it sixty times, and I would rather it was shut.