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Tucson Water plans a major effort to try to reduce the amount of water it loses or cannot account for, officials said.

Tucson Water Director David Modeer said he will give the City Council a plan this fall outlining the costs and benefits of reducing the total water loss and unaccounted-for water from 10 percent to 7 percent of the city's total annual water use.

He said the water losses, the majority stemming from inaccurate meters, are costing the system about $860,000 a year.

The effort will come after prodding from one council member, Steve Leal, who said this kind of water loss is more significant than wasted water that illegally runs off yards and grassy shopping centers onto the street.

"He says he's going to hire three water cops, and that's all well and good," Leal said. "But the real conservation comes from shrinking your loss from 10 to 7 percent or less.

"The analogy is that instead of trying to find other sources of oil, it's been proven we can get more energy by conserving it," Leal added. "We can't control the price of water from someone who wants to sell it to us on the open market. We can have some control over whether we build systems that leak or not."

Tucson Water's total annual water use is about 124,000 acre-feet, or about 40.4 billion gallons. Ten percent of that, 12,400 acre-feet, is about 4 billion gallons and 7 percent is about 2.8 billion gallons.

An acre-foot is enough for three typical single-family homes per year, meaning that the city cannot account for the amount of water that annually serves 36,000 typical homes.

City officials have said they don't know how much water runs down the street or is otherwise wasted.

The national standard for water losses is about 10 percent, according to the American Water Works Association. Leal and Tucson Water officials agreed that in the desert it's important to do better.

About 5 percent of Tucson Water's total use is actually lost to the system through leaks or other problems. Another 5 percent isn't lost because authorities know where it goes, but its use isn't fully accounted for.

Typically, lost and unaccounted for water has several sources:

● Aging meters. Out of about 220,000 city water meters, nearly 50,000 are more than 20 years old. Those often don't catch low flows such as those from a toilet flush. When meters pass 15 years old, their accuracy declines by 2 percent to 3 percent from an original accuracy rate of 98 to 100 percent for new meters. Many city wells, around 50 percent of fewer than 150 currently active city wells, aren't metered at all. Inaccurate or nonexistent meters mean the city doesn't know how much water a well is pumping or a homeowner is using.

The city has replaced 17,000 old meters since September 2004 and plans to spend another $6 million over the next five years replacing more, Modeer said.

● Leaks. The Tucson Water system had 220 water leaks in 2005, out of 400 calls complaining of city water-line breaks, Modeer said. The city has 4,000 miles of pipelines, but "we know (the lost water) is not going out in leakage," he said. Tucson Water spokesman Mitch Basefsky said the utility believes it finds most of the leaks.

● Water theft. Sometimes people bypass their meters by installing a separate pipe to connect to a city water line. It is often but not exclusively done by contractors looking for water to mix cement with or hold down dust stirred up by construction work, city officials said. Water theft accounts for less than 1 percent of the 10 percent total lost and unaccounted for by the city, Modeer said.

● Fire flows. The city doesn't meter how much water firefighters pull from hydrants to put out fires: "We can only guess what that is," Basefsky said. That water isn't considered lost, however, because officials know where it goes.

At a recent City Council meeting, Leal said that Tucson Water appears to be spending more energy "going after the old lady with roses" in her front yard to save water than it does going after systemwide water losses.

Because city ratepayers ultimately pay for water losses, every percent of added efficiency is really important for protecting future ratepayers, Leal said at the June 27 meeting.

The councilman was skeptical of the city's $860,000 cost estimate from the lost water. That's because the city charges ratepayers far more, proportionately, to buy water for use in their homes and businesses than that value that Modeer gave for the 4 billion gallons of lost and unaccounted for water, Leal said.

Modeer said the cost of the lost water is lower, compared to what customers pay for water they use because the costs of the lost water only represent pumping costs and other production costs that are paid to bring water out of the ground.

They don't include personnel and all other costs that go into a water system that ratepayers typically pay for in their bills and that have to be paid whether the water is lost or not, Modeer said.