A permanently metered zone of a water network, used to localise leaks by watching how much water flows in when nobody should be using it.
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A district metering area is a section of a water network sealed off by closed valves and permanently metered at every point where water enters it. Because the zone's consumption is now measurable on its own, the utility can watch its minimum night flow — the water still moving at three in the morning, when almost nobody is drawing any. If that floor rises, the extra is almost certainly leaking, and the search is narrowed from a city to a few streets.
Sectorisation is the method that turns non-revenue water from an annual accounting figure into something a crew can act on this week. Casablanca's operator reports its entire network of more than 7,000 km under permanent district metering, backed by roughly 4,000 fixed acoustic sensors; Istanbul pairs metered zones with pressure and night-flow monitoring under SCADA.
The caveat is that zoning is only the measurement. Alexandria's new control centre watches pressures without any published district metering or night-flow work — and its entry notes that the utility's own loss curve therefore has to be taken on trust.
Added 2026-08-20 · Part of the growing Smart City Glossary