Photo: 123RF
Wellington Water is asking companies to lay out options for it to introduce water metering for households.
A tender has just been issued to find out about products, implementation and costs. It closes next month.
"We want to test our thinking," it said.
The aim is to install about 135,000 meters in the next five or six years across the metropolitan area.
At the same time, the agency wants to know about analytic programmes to help it track leaks, and also track how fixing them is going.
Tender documents said it was imperative the region reduce water use that was substantially higher than in Auckland, and almost twice that allowed in the UK and Copenhagen.
Too much water is being taken out of Te Awa Kairangi Hutt River, and the aquifer it feeds, damaging it.
"Within the next 10 years we will need to shift from the current position where more water is being taken than is sustainable."
The agency expects meters could cut demand by about a tenth of current levels by 2030 - without action, a chart shows it might more than double by 2050 to 500 million litres a day.
"Without investment to reduce demand and increase supply capacity there are likely to be more frequent and significant water restrictions, particularly during summer," one document said.
"An inadequate buffer between supply and demand also prevents completion of critical maintenance during winter and constrains delivery of capital works, which increases costs and makes the network vulnerable to unplanned failures."
More than 60 percent of New Zealand households are already metered.
The Wellington metropolitan councils have been hiking rates in large part to fix degraded water services.
Myriad leaks are part of the problem. The tender said Wellington Water expected to identify, track, and manage "thousands of private side leaks across the region over decades", and needed tools to let it track how that was going.
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