The council approved a year-long district-wide water metering trial from April 1 next year, at a cost of $275,000.
Cr Simon Stamers-Smith voted against the recommendation.
Chief executive Adam Feeley said he and Mayor Vanessa van Uden met the Auditor-general's office on Wednesday and the proposal was ''very much consistent'' with where it would like to see local government go.
Mr Feeley said the Wellington City Council spent $7 million to better understand its water use and as a result had reduced its infrastructure spending on water by $52 million.
''Fundamentally, this is an exercise in understanding not just our water use, but [our infrastructure],'' Mr Feeley said.
Chief engineer Ulrich Glasner was asked why residents were not being offered ''incentives'' to reduce their water usage. Mr Glasner said the metering trial was the start of a process to determine
the volume of water used and help form decisions on managing future water demand.
Cr Ella Lawton said it was important ratepayers understood the trial could actually save them money, rather than cost them, as had happened in Tauranga and Kapiti.
Communications manager Michele Poole said there was a public communications plan and water metering was a ''very small part'' of a long-running campaign.
''This is one of those forever issues. When we're trying to change people's behaviour, if you think of it in the context of drink-driving and stopping smoking, you can't just do this with a press release and some information on the website. There is a lot to be done.
''Lake Hayes Estate is a perennial issue; for others, they live beside the lake, it's difficult to move them from free water [in the lake] to what comes out of their tap that they pay for.''
Cr Stamers-Smith said he had ''difficulty with this, full stop''.
''We've got so much water available down here, I'm not sure why we're going for this. We're wasting about ... 40% ... of our water because of the systems we've got at the moment. ''We'd be better fixing the 40% problem that we've got rather than going out and setting up [a water metering system].
The trial would provide certainty about the cost of installing meters across the district and information to quantify the potential usage and leakage in the district, Mr Glasner said.
It would also inform the metering cost-benefit analysis being done to demonstrate whether the financial and other benefits outweighed the cost of implementation, he said.
