Remotely monitor water meters for leaks

[Corey G.]

Hello everyone. I've been reading on biggerpockets for a while but have rarely posted anything before. Thought I would finally ask for some advice. If you can help, I would appreciate it. 

First off, I have some multiplexes I own in different areas of the city and none of them have been metered separately for water so I pay it and just charge a little more for rent. This works well until there is a leak at the property and then I have a huge water bill. I'm trying to get my tenants to be a little more observant and have considered charging them if they don't catch leaks soon enough. The problem is the water usage is for 4 units and determining how much to charge a tenant for an overage is tricky. What if there were multiple leaks? So ideally, I would like to catch the leaks before they become a problem. It looks like there are water meters I could install after the city meter which do pulse output but I don't know how that works or if it will do remote monitoring. I'm pretty sure the city uses RF signals to read the meters. Is there a device I can buy that would read the meters once or twice a day and have that sent to me so I can monitor it. Has anyone found a good solution to remotely monitor water consumption? 

[James DeRoest]

The way to find a water leak within the units is to look for a large patch of water. It's usually wet.

The only thing you have to worry about are toilets that run continuously. And even then, they don't use huge amounts of water. If a toilet runs at full pressure, the tenant is going to call you sooner than later from the sheer racket it's making.

If you are purely looking for leaks, you will spend significant sums of money to save yourself very little money in the long run. 

But going back to the "wet patch", for a leak to actually hurt financially, you are looking at 10s of thousands of gallons. Even the most ardent slum tenant will call you after the first 1000 gallons rips through their home.