Reading Common Kansas Flow Meters

Since all the wells in GMD 4 are metered, it never hurts to cover the reading of water flow meters from time to time.  Kansas meter specs have been adopted by our GMD, and they allow for any number of meters to be used by water right owners.  All the meters listed on the Kansas approved meter list have been approved as meeting the state specs.  This is good in most respects, but it does mean plenty of different-looking meters are out there.

Fundamentally, they are in most ways similar, though.  Most read in either "Gallons", "Acrefeet", or "Acreinches", and most have both a totalizer (odometer-type numbers) and a volume of water sweep hand (speedometer-type hand).  Finally, most of the totalizers have two or three fixed digits following the wheel-type numbers.

In reading any water flow meter, you need to know the "units" the meter is calibrated in (Gallons, Acrefeet, etc.) and its multiplication factor.  Two fixed digits equals a multiplication factor of 100 for meters measuring Gallons (left example in jpg below) while three fixed digits equals a multiplication factor of 1000 - again, for meters measuring Gallons (right example in jpg below).  Click the images to enlarge.

The most common meters we have in GMD 4 are calibrated in Acrefeet.  The multiplication factor works differently for these units.  A multiplication factor of .01 (left image below) indicates where the decimal will be placed in the string of numbers - in this case two digits from the right.  And three digits from the right in the case of a .001 multiplier (right image below)  In most cases the decimal digits will be a different color, or otherwise differentiated from the whole numbers.

If you're still confused, we have a meter calculator on our website HERE.  While pretty nifty, you still need to know your units and multiplication factor.  We have pictures of the common meters on the website so you know which calculator to use.

Finally, to calculate how much water has been pumped, you need to subtract your starting meter reading from the ending meter reading - as the totalizer is cumulative and does not reset.  If you didn't jot down your starting reading, you're toast - unless it was a brand new meter which of course started at zero.  (Just think of this the same way you'd figure out how many miles your son put on the family car for his date last Saturday night.)  However, this gets tricky if the meter has rolled over in the middle of your pumping season.  Yeah, you'd figure it out if the car odometer rolled over on date night, so you can do this, too.  But if you get stuck, use our website meter calculator.

As always, if you have a specific question, call the office.  In many cases we monitor meter values from time to time throughout the year, and will always have the reported ending meter reading from the year before.

God Forbid California Should Look Elsewhere for Direction

Sometimes I just don't get it.  An inordinately large amount of the water news over the past several months has been on the California situation.  A lot of the criticism has been over the lack of water monitoring and measurement (metering) especially groundwater by agriculture - the group that uses most of the state's water.  It's like no one else in the world has any water problems quite as large, or complex and pressing, or, has any solutions that California would remotely be interested in.

For the Californians in the audience, I'd like to offer that Kansas has been monitoring water use since the mid 1970s, took significant strides to improve that monitoring in the late 1980s, and began metering all non-domestic wells in selected areas in the late 1990s.  Today, Kansas has some of the best (most complete and accurate) water use reporting - especially for irrigation and municipal water use - in the country.  Review some of these reports at your leisure KWO Water Use Reports and assess for yourself how useful this data might be for yourself.  And the data itself is also available to the public on a website maintained by the Kansas Geological Survey - WIMAS.  This data on water rights and reported water use is uploaded every day from the Division of Water Resources.  And finally, KGS also maintains the obervation well network on about 1,700 water level measurements taken each year in Kansas (KS Water Level Data).  And Kansas likely is not the only western state that has been monitoring its water resources and use.

Having been through most of Kansas' program development, I'll admit that it was not always that easy and wasn't particularly popular with the water users, but now that it's been done, most everyone recognizes the benefits and appreciates the fairness of it all.  The most common comment I get now is:  "Why didn't we do this 25 years ago?"  I guess it's none of my business what California chooses to do or not do, so I'll just sit back and watch as they continue to argue over what probably is the most important thing they could possibly do with regard to their water resource and its allocation, management and conservation.  Should eventually keep the water lawyers very busy, though.