On occasion of provision of a technique for identifying an appliance, an attempt can be made to enhance computing speed and the accuracy of identification of an appliance while the amount of memory required for an apparatus is reduced. In a gas meter 100, an ultrasonic flowmeter 104 measures the quantity of a gas flowing through a flow path 102 at a given time interval, and a computation section 108 computes a difference value of the measured flow at each given time. A difference value conversion section 112 converts a computed difference value into a code with reference to a flow rate class table 110a by which a plurality of difference value classes corresponding to a size of the difference value and codes representing the respective classes are associated with each other. A code sequence generation section 114 further generates a measurement code sequence from an aggregation of codes at each given time, and an appliance identification section 116 compares the measurement code sequence with an appliance characteristic code sequence showing a characteristic code sequence of each gas appliance, thereby identifying a gas appliance that uses a gas.