Should Rundle Put Smart Water Meters in Every Home?

Resolution: "The town of Rundle should replace every household's water meter with a smart meter that reports water use to the utility each hour."

Background: A water meter measures how much water a home uses. In the fictional town of Rundle, a worker reads each meter only twice a year. Between readings, the utility sends estimated bills based on past use. A smart meter, also called an advanced meter, sends readings automatically and often, without a worker walking to the house. Rundle is deciding whether to spend the money to switch every home to smart meters at once. The choice pits faster leak alerts and accurate bills against the cost of the meters and the privacy of detailed water-use records.

Roles: Divide the class into an affirmative team (for the resolution) and a negative team (against it). Assign one student as moderator to keep time and one small panel as judges who score with the rubric. Each team prepares an opening claim, at least one rebuttal, and a closing. Judges may ask one question of each team after the rebuttals.

Case for the smart meters:

1. Smart meters flag leaks fast. Household leaks waste an average of nearly 9,400 gallons per year, and hourly data can catch a leak within days instead of months. Early alerts save water and money for the household. (Source: EPA WaterSense Fix a Leak Week.)
2. Bills become accurate. With hourly readings, Rundle would stop sending estimated bills, so households pay for the water they actually used rather than a guess. (Illustrative point based on how estimated billing works.)
3. Smart meters support conservation. When families can see their daily water use, they can find waste and cut it, and the utility can spot unusually high use and warn the customer. (Illustrative point.)
4. A fictional Rundle finance report prepared for this debate estimates that automatic reading would, over many years, reduce the labor cost of sending workers to read meters by hand. (Illustrative estimate created for this debate, not a documented figure.)

Case against the smart meters:

1. The meters cost a lot up front. Buying and installing a meter for every home runs into millions of dollars, and utilities usually pass that cost to ratepayers through bills. A widely used rule of thumb, built by adding two EPA benchmarks, treats combined water and sewer costs above roughly 4.5 percent of household income as a high burden, and EPA's 2024 affordability assessment also used a lower 3 percent line. Higher bills would push some Rundle households closer to those lines. (Source: EPA Water Affordability Needs Assessment and EPA affordability benchmarks.)
2. Hourly data raises privacy concerns. A detailed record of water use can hint at when people are home, asleep, or away on a trip. Some residents object to the utility holding that fine-grained record of their daily lives. (Illustrative point based on a real privacy concern.)
3. The systems can fail. Meters and their software can break or lose data, and some residents, including older ones, prefer a person reading a simple meter to a digital system they cannot check themselves. (Illustrative point.)
4. A fictional ratepayer group created for this debate, the Rundle Ratepayers Alliance, argues that the town should first repair the known leaks in its own water mains before spending on household meters, since the town's own pipes waste water too. (Illustrative testimony created for this debate.)