Qualify each utility independently
Gas, water, electric — three separate answers
Three utilities, three companies, three decisions made decades apart. A house can easily have one chatty meter and two silent ones.
The single most common mistake is treating "does my meter transmit?" as one question. It is three, and they have different answers at the same address, because your gas, water and electric meters were installed by three different companies with three different budgets in three different decades.
At the address the field log on the home page comes from: the gas meter decodes cleanly, the water meter is mechanical and silent, and the electric meter is a 1970s induction disk with no electronics in it at all. One out of three. That is a normal result, not a failed install.
Gas meters
The most reliably readable of the three. A bolted-on module is a near-certain yes.
Good odds, weak signalWater meters
Often readable, and the only type that broadcasts a leak flag. Transmits from a hole in the ground.
All or nothingElectric meters
The richest payload if it speaks IDM, and completely hopeless otherwise. No middle ground.
Why the three differ so much
The differences are not arbitrary. They follow directly from what each utility needed to solve.
| Gas | Water | Electric | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meter location | Outside wall or basement | Buried pit, or basement | Outside wall |
| Has mains power? | No — battery only | No — battery only | Yes, inherently |
| Typical protocol | SCM / SCM+ | R900, SCM | IDM, or closed mesh |
| Payload | Cumulative total | Total plus leak flag | Interval history, or nothing |
| Chance it's readable | Good | Mixed | Polarised |
The power row explains most of the rest. A gas or water meter runs on a battery that has to last fifteen to twenty years, which forces a design that wakes up, shouts a short unencrypted packet, and goes back to sleep — exactly the behaviour that makes it easy to receive. An electric meter has unlimited power by definition, so its designers were free to build a two-way encrypted mesh network instead. They frequently did.
That is the whole thesis of this site in one table: the meters that are easiest to read are the ones that could not afford to be complicated.
Do all three in one pass
If you already own a dongle, survey the whole band once with no ID filter and see everything at once, rather than qualifying each meter separately:
rtl_433 -f 915M -s 1024k
You will see your neighbours too. That is expected and useful — it proves the receiver works.