# Submeter Repair and Replacement

Source: https://submeter.com/submeter-repair-and-replacement/
Publisher: National Exemption Service (NES), https://submeter.com. Last reviewed September 2026.

NES repairs, recalibrates, and replaces water, gas, and electric submeters at apartment communities, including meters another company installed.

## Who repairs or replaces submeters at an apartment community?
The submetering company that services the property, and NES does it for communities it did not install as well. Most failures are a transmitter battery, a lost wireless link, or a stuck register, which a technician fixes on site in under an hour per unit. When a meter body is worn, corroded, or an obsolete model with no parts, NES replaces it with a nonproprietary meter the owner keeps, from manufacturers such as Badger, Neptune, and NextCentury, and puts it under an extended warranty. Reads resume the same day, and residents are billed from actual reads, never estimates, while the work is under way.

## Repair or replace?
- Repair: dead transmitter battery, failed transmitter, register fouled by sediment, repeater or gateway offline. Parts and labor, same visit
- Replace: meter body corroded or leaking, accuracy out of tolerance after calibration, a proprietary or discontinued model with no parts, or a system whose vendor has gone away
- Portfolio-wide: when a community's meters are all the same age and failing one after another, a planned replacement costs less than a string of service calls

## What NES does on a service call
- Diagnoses from the read history first, so the technician arrives knowing which units and which likely fault
- Tests meter accuracy against a calibrated reference and documents the result
- Replaces batteries, transmitters, registers, or the whole meter as needed, on the spot
- Re-links every unit to the gateway and confirms reads before leaving
- Adds the new equipment to NES Meter Care, with optional extended warranty coverage

## Meters another company installed
NES services and replaces submeters regardless of who put them in. Nonproprietary brands can usually be repaired and folded into NES billing as they are. Proprietary systems that only the original vendor can read are the usual reason a property switches; NES replaces those with open equipment the owner controls, and takes over billing the same month.

## What it costs
A battery or transmitter swap is a fraction of a new meter. A full replacement runs a few hundred dollars per unit installed, depending on access to the line and whether a water heater has to be moved, and NES prices it from a site visit, not a guess. Meters with optional NES Meter Care coverage are replaced under the warranty terms.

## Questions
**Can a water submeter be repaired?**
Usually. Batteries, transmitters, and registers are replaceable on most nonproprietary meters, and a service visit fixes the majority of dead or flat reads. A corroded or leaking meter body is replaced instead.

**How long do submeters last?**
Meter bodies typically 15 to 20 years; transmitter batteries 10 to 20 years depending on the model and read frequency. NES's daily reads show a meter degrading before it fails outright.

**Who can replace a submeter?**
A submetering company or a licensed plumber for the meter body, plus whoever runs the reading system for the transmitter and gateway. NES technicians do both in one visit.

**Do residents get billed while a meter is out?**
From actual reads only. NES does not estimate. Once the meter is back, the unit is billed from the verified read, and any gap is handled per the lease and state rules.

**Does NES repair meters it did not install?**
Yes. NES services nonproprietary meters from any installer and replaces proprietary systems with open equipment the owner keeps.