SOME STATISTICS 121 



3. Under-registration of meters. 



4. Water used for various purposes, not registered or esti- 

 mated, as, for instance, water used for flushing sewers. 



5. Loss by seepage and evaporation from service reservoirs. 

 The Committee had no means of distributing the total loss 



among the different sources of loss, but stated its belief that 

 under-registration of meters accounts for a substantial part of 

 the total loss in systems where the pipes and service pipes have 

 been carefully and systematically followed up for leakage and 

 where there have been no considerable uses of water for flushing 

 sewers and similar uses without record being made of it. 



As can be ascertained from the statistics which follow, meters 

 on about half (48 per cent) of the total number of services pass 

 less than 100 gallons per day. (Fig. 22, p. 197.) 



There are few meters in use at the present time that will 

 register a steady flow of as little as 100 gallons per day. 



If the amount of water now shown by that half of all meters 

 which pass the smallest quantities of water were to pass at a 

 uniform rate, it would all pass as leakage without moving the 

 pistons or discs of the meters and would fail to be recorded. 



It is recorded in part because that part which is recorded is 

 drawn at higher rates, but whenever there is leakage in plumbing, 

 so that the leak amounts to less than 100 gallons per day, more 

 or less according to the sensitiveness of the meter, the amount 

 of water so lost by leakage will pass without being registered. 

 The water that is registered probably is all drawn during, at 

 most, one or two hours per day, and during the remaining twenty- 

 two or twenty- thiee hours there will be no registration of what- 

 ever water is lost by leakage in the plumbing. 



Some of the large-size meters will pass much larger quantities 

 without registering. 



The above statistics are the most complete and up-to-date 

 now available. Considerable labor is required to prepare the 

 records, and data from many large completely metered systems 

 are not available. 



Fall River Experience. One of the earliest of the completely 

 metered systems, and one in which waste has been most per- 



