AWWA Manual M6 lays out the accuracy testing and maintenance practices utilities are expected to follow for large meters, and increasingly, auditors and rate regulators expect to see a documented program that follows it — not just occasional spot checks. Building that program from scratch, though, is a bigger undertaking than it looks: it means establishing test frequency by meter size and criticality, tracking accuracy curves across the flow range, and maintaining records that connect testing history to non-revenue-water accounting.
The most common failure mode isn't testing infrequently — it's testing inconsistently. A large meter tested once at a single flow point tells you almost nothing about how it performs across its full operating range, particularly at the low-flow end where most positive-displacement and turbine meters lose accuracy first. AWWA M6 guidance around multi-point testing exists precisely because that low-flow degradation is where most of the real revenue loss hides.
The second failure mode is disconnecting meter testing from non-revenue-water analysis. A utility can run a technically compliant testing program and still miss the bigger picture if test results aren't fed back into system-wide loss accounting — because that's ultimately what regulators and rate cases care about.
Automating the workflow — scheduling tests by meter criticality, capturing multi-point accuracy curves electronically, and rolling results directly into non-revenue-water reporting — is where most of the practical time savings come from. Utilities that make this shift typically report meaningfully lower administrative burden per meter tested, simply because results no longer have to be transcribed and reconciled by hand across separate systems.
Done well, an AWWA M6-aligned program stops being a compliance exercise and becomes the data source that justifies capital planning for meter replacement — turning a regulatory requirement into an operational asset.