Smart Wireless Water Meter Reading System (SWWMRS) built on the conventional Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) platform can not meet the requirements of low cost, low power consumption, high efficiency and high reliability in practice. In this work, a novel SWWMRS for typical multi-story buildings was proposed. Based on the feature of the SWWMRS and deployment environment as well as the business logic, an improved algorithm for all neighbor discoveries was proposed to achieve automatic networking and centralized routing management. At the meter reading stage, a minimum global forward strategy with a minimum residual energy nodes avoidance strategy were adopted to balance the energy consumption between nodes. Additionally, the mechanism to avoid confliction in Media Access Control (MAC) layer and the low power idle listening strategy were optimized. The testing results for the proposed system in a 24-story residential building show that the system performance of communication distance, power consumption and reliability can meet the needs of the practical applications. Meanwhile, compared with CC2530 scheme, better performance in communication distance, meter reading success rate, efficiency and power consumption can be achieved.