📡 Data & IoT

Houston Water's Decade-Long Smart Meter Replacement

Houston Public Works began replacing the remote-read sensors on the city's roughly 480,000 water meters in 2021, aiming to finish within a decade — but by December 2023 only 78,905–85,000 had actually been swapped, and more than 125,000 of the older 1998–2010-era remote-read sensors already installed elsewhere in the system had stopped transmitting, meaning some customers were being billed on estimates rather than real readings. After a multi-year local-news investigation ('DRAINED') into unexplained bill spikes, City Council approved an $8.5 million pilot in August 2025 to install 25,000 fully solid-state smart meters with near-real-time online usage data, testing installation logistics across every council district ahead of a wider rollout.

In build 📅 since 2021

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below — how this works · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-02

📡 Data & IoT Water Sensors & IoT

📊 Impact

More than 125,000 of the roughly 480,000-meter fleet's existing remote-read sensors had stopped transmitting by early 2024, versus only 78,905–85,000 meters upgraded under the 2021-started replacement project by December 2023.

🎓 Lesson

A 'smart' meter upgrade that can't outrun its own maintenance backlog isn't smart yet — it's just newer hardware queued to fail the same way the old hardware did.

Evidence📰 Media

Scale🏙️ City-wide

Cost$8.5M for the 2025 pilot phase (25,000 meters)

📖 Terms in this entry: Non-revenue water (NRW) · Adaptive traffic signals · Digital twin

Sources

↗ Click2Houston — Has the city upgraded water meter sensors in your neighborhood?~480,000 total meters, 2021 project start, 78,905–85,000 replaced by Dec 2023, 125,000+ existing remote-read sensors non-functional

↗ Click2Houston — New smart water meters aim to resolve Houston billing issuesAug 2025 council approval of $8.5M/25,000-meter pilot, DRAINED billing investigation context, 315,000 meters over 20 years old, near-real-time online usage data

↗ Houston Public Works — Water Bill Improvement Plan Update (council committee, May 2026)Cited by press as the source underlying the program; PDF text could not be extracted for direct quoting

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

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Compare this project

🇨🇦 Montreal Non-Residential Water Metering, After the Cancelled Contract · Montreal Another meter rollout that fell behind its own contract — Montreal's took a cancelled deal and 15+ years to finish billing. 🇺🇸 SFPUC Automated Water Meter Programme · San Francisco The rollout Houston hasn't matched: SF's 2010 AMR project covers 96%+ of accounts with functioning leak alerts. 🇰🇷 Incheon Smart Remote Water Metering & Leak Detection · Incheon Same remote-read ambition, similar pace problem — Incheon's own rollout was still only 37% complete by 2024. 🇺🇸 Smart Water Meter Rollout · Atlanta Same broken-meter-to-estimated-billing origin story, but Houston's remote-read rollout has stalled with sensors going dark.

Explore the wider context

📟 A Reading Is Not a Decision 💧 Water guide 🏙️ Houston city profile 📡 Data & IoT projects

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Houston Water's Decade-Long Smart Meter Replacement” — Houston, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/houston-water-smart-metering/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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