The development of the water meter has a history of nearly two hundred years since the invention of the balance tank water meter with the characteristics of the instrument in 1825. In China, the use and production of water meters started relatively late.
In 1879, Li Hongzhang established China's first water plant in Lv Shunkou to run the Navy. In 1883, the British colonialists built a second water plant in Shanghai, and water meters began to enter China.
As some coastal cities built water plants one after another, by the 1930s, water plants such as Shanghai Guanghua Machinery Factory (the predecessor of Shanghai Guanghua Instrument Factory) imported some parts from abroad to produce water meters. For quite a long time, the water meters of Britain, France, Japan, Germany and other countries have been occupying the Chinese water meter markets. These water meters of different varieties and specifications have different standards and cannot be interchanged with each other, which brought difficulties to the water meter maintenance of water companies. After liberation in 1949, with the development of urban water supply, China's water meter industry also developed accordingly.
Since 1955, water companies in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Nanjing, Wuhan, Guangzhou and other cities have successively produced water meters. In the early 1980s, under the organization of the Water Meter Industry Professional Research Institute, according to the requirements of the international standard ISO4046 for water meters at that time, a nationally designed water meter with eight pointers and integral impeller was introduced for small-caliber water meters. The unified design and plasticization of water meter components have created favorable conditions for the organization of specialized production of water meters, greatly promoted the progress and development of China's water meter industry, and met the development needs of the growing urban and rural water industry.
Since the 1990s, China's economy has continued to develop rapidly, and the water meter industry has also developed rapidly. The number of enterprises and total output have more than doubled. At the same time, various intelligent water meters, water meter reading systems and other products have also begun to emerge.