May-June 2009

Accounting for Use

How three different communities or water companies are instituting AMR/AMI systems into meter reading and water management

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“It is the ultimate in water conservation.”

When speaking of automatic meter reading (AMR)/Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) systems, that’s the opinion of Charlie Gray, the CEO of the Chesterfield County Rural Water Company (CCRWC), a private, non-profit corporation in South Carolina. “I don’t know of any other utility where you can get this much information for your customers,” he says. “It tells you everything you want to know.”

In the past, active meters were checked maybe once a month, inactive meters once a quarter. With AMR systems, utility companies have the ability to read water meters at any time of the day or be notified if there is a problem.

“Without AMR, there is no exact accounting for water use,” says Steve Zip, account executive for government markets with Johnson Controls Inc. “With AMR, you can get an exact calculated use of water.”

The CCRWC is one of a growing number of water companies and utilities that are discovering how AMR/AMI systems not only save water, but also save money. Here are the stories of how three different communities or water companies are instituting AMR/AMI systems into meter reading and water management.

The Village of Wellington, Florida
Using an AMR system is nothing new for the Village of Wellington. “We’ve long been aggressive in using technology and using the best available means of reading meters,” says Tom Amburgey, Chief Information Officer of the Village of Wellington.

The Village has had an AMR system in place for about 10 years; until recently, it was a drive-by system. However, Amburgey explains, that former system was not a good fit for Wellington. There was also a desire to cut costs and improve customer service.

“We found the Badger system and the ability to hook it through WiFi a lot better for us,” he says.

So, the Village of Wellington is replacing its water meters with Badger Meter meters that are equipped with ORION transmitters. “It’s a hybrid system that uses 900 megahertz radio frequency to read the meters,” explains Amburgey. “It allows for drive-by reading, touch reading, or through WiFi, like we’re going to use it.”

Photo: Sensus Metering Systems Chesterfield utilized existing company-owned properties for deploying its FlexNet system.

A series of collectors have been built in strategic spots throughout the community. These collectors will communicate back to the main depository through the WiFi system.

“It’s fairly standard technology today in terms of the radio,” says Amburgey. “What makes it unique and valuable is the ability to have these collectors that pull stuff back to read through the WiFi. They call them gateways.”

Amburgey says that, with this Badger system, the water department will be able to read approximately 20,000 water meters in 15 minutes. The meters will be read once a day. “We’ll have great ability to detect leaks and problems,” he says.

One aspect that makes the Village of Wellington different from many other communities is that it has a high number of seasonal residents, which, in turn, means a lot of meters that are turned on and off throughout the year. The Badger system will allow these meters to be operated more simply, but will also allow the Village to better monitor the meters for problems.

“You can think of it as two layers of networks going on here,” says Denise Barton marketing director with Tropos Network, which is the network supplying the WiFi.

It is a mesh network system, rather than a point-to-point wireless network. This means there is a redundancy in the data being sent, so it is not all passing through a single tower, and in a place where hurricanes are prevalent, having multiple levels of network points means a network that keeps working.

Or as Barton says, “There is the non-tethered megahertz network. And then there is an overlay on top of that to the collectors.”

This is where the Tropos Network fits in. This network brings in all of the data and communicates all of the meter information back to the central location. 

Amburgey says the Village was looking at a system that, if it was going to blanket the entire community, could monitor other areas, as well.

“We wanted to use it for security cameras, for example,” he continues. “We wanted the opportunity to use it for systems outside of AMR. When we started evaluating fixed-based systems, the company we formally worked with was proprietary. The only thing we would have been able to do was read the meters over it. We wanted more flexibility than that.”

When investigating the systems available, the Village leaders evaluated what they perceived to be best in terms of distribution, the strongest radio technology, cost, and customer service.

“Badger scored on top for us,” says Amburgey. “And this is saving us about 50 dollars a meter.”

The Village of Wellington considers itself to be a progressive community and one that always provides the best services with the least intrusion to its 60,000 residents, which is one reason AMR technology was initiated in the first place. Wellington leaders also feel it is important to be fiscally responsible.

The area covered by the Village’s water department is over 40 square miles, and it required many people to effectively manually read the water meters.

Photo: Sensus Metering Systems The tower gateway base station collects meter information for Chesterfield water customers.

“When you look at the business efficiency, even 10 years ago when the cost of the AMR system was a little greater, the payback was excellent,” says Amburgey. “It gave us the ability to simply drive by without having to walk through yards. It gave us flexibility on where water meters could be placed, as well. You didn’t have to worry about meter readers having access to your house or property once a month, just for emergencies.”

With the drive-by AMR system, the Village of Wellington water department was able to reduce the number of staff that was reading meters; hence, making them available to fix leaks and other maintenance issues. By moving to the Badger system and WiFi, the Village will now be able to cover its entire area with a single meter reading, with a person who will be out in the field to do re-readings or for special situations. The rest of the staff will be allocated to check water lines and handle customer service.

Installation of the Badger system began in late November 2009, with an anticipated finish date of May 2009. Gateway collectors have been placed strategically around the Village and its service area.

“Badger came out and did the field site survey,” says Amburgey. “They do frequency checks and monitoring. Each collector can handle only so much data.”

The collectors are placed, then, where they are thought to be most efficient; however, as the system is installed, locations are being fine-tuned. “We’ll do tests and sometimes find gaps,” he adds. “So we go back and add units as necessary.”

Amburgey also believes the Badger system will help the Village of Wellington do a better job conserving water.

“It’s an intuitive system,” he says.

As the system builds historical data into its database, it will be able to create a profile for users, which can help detect leaks or unusual water usage. The water department can deduce a historical usage level for a customer and, thanks to daily readings, note whether or not there is an unusual increase.

“Because we’ve reallocated our staff, we can drive around the area to make sure there is no water leaking at the meter or water pooling on the road,” says Amburgey. “We can also check for backend leaks or inefficiencies in the processing of the water.”

The Village of Wellington is retrofitting their lift stations with an apparatus, multi-smart controllers that will allow remote command control.

“An alarm that used to take 15 minutes for a response can now be controlled immediately,” says Amburgey. “We’ll be able to turn off and on pumps remotely. When you start talking about sewer spills or hurricanes, the ability to control the lift stations gives us better management capabilities throughout the city.”

The Badger system will also offer an option for residents to buy a unit that allows them to read their own water meter.

“The customer could turn their water off, and then make sure the meter isn’t reading anything,” says Amburgey. “Or, they could see how much water they are using in their sprinkler system. It allows customers to be proactive in their own water conservation.”

Photo: Badger Meter GALAXY installation in Shreveport, LA

Chesterfield County, South Carolina
The installation of the AMR system in Chesterfield County has been a collaborative effort between the private non-profit business Chesterfield County Rural Water Company and the water utilities of the towns of Chesterfield and Cheraw, SC.

Chesterfield County is a large county in size, almost 850 square miles, and the Chesterfield County Rural Water Company provides the water utility for the majority of the county residents.

“I had three trucks and two individuals in each truck,” explains Charlie Gray, Chesterfield County Rural Water Company CEO. “It would take 10 to 12 days to read the meters. That was totally unacceptable, not only from a manpower standpoint, but also from the fuel costs to drive across the county.”

The water company was using a touch-read system, but Gray decided to move on to another system. He first considered a drive-by system, but then heard about the Sensus FlexNet system.

“We went with that system because the Sensus meters are all continuously upgradeable,” says Gray. “The technology expands from one generation to the next generation without having to replace anything.”

A propagation study was done to measure the topography and the distribution of meters. A recommendation of towers is derived from this study.

“Typically, they’ll use cell phone towers,” says Gray.

However, the cost to essentially rent space for antennae on these towers was between $600–800 a month per tower. 

“At first, it looked like we could go with eight towers, but we ended up needing 14,” he says. This made using the cell phone towers cost prohibitive. So Gray decided another route.

“We used water tanks instead,” adds Gray. “When I was looking at this, I decided to ask local towns if they wanted to join us in this effort. Cheraw and Chesterfield agreed.”

The carrot Gray dangled in front of the communities was a cooperative deal that would benefit everyone. He asked if antennae could be attached to the water tanks in those communities. In return, the communities would be able to use the fixed-base computer system to read their meters.

This worked well for the town of Chesterfield, which was facing a population of aging water meters that were becoming less efficient, according to David Huntley, town administrator.  “We had some that were on an average read because they had quit working or were unreadable,” he says.

Knowing the meters had to be replaced, Huntley says the question was whether to install new manual readers or to investigate the new technologies available. “Of course, as economic times got tighter, it was more important to get a bigger bang for the buck,” he says. 

Johnson Controls approached Huntley and the town of Chesterfield with a program they had in place that would allow the project to pay for itself over the time of financing.

“We could get what we needed for efficient readings while saving on operating costs,” says Huntley.

Chesterfield contracts its water supply through the Chester County Rural Water Company, so it made sense for them to form the partnership. “Then it became a matter of putting the database together as to how many meters we already had, what types of meters, and then going through the process of having Johnson Controls go change them out,” says Huntley.

Both Gray and Huntley agree that the AMR has increased water efficiency efforts in their community.

“One advantage we found is that during some unusually cold weather we’ve had, we were able to go into the system and identify potential leaks,” says Huntley. “We then notified the customers of the potential of a broken pipe. Our customers were very appreciative of that.”

Gray adds that another water management benefit is the ability to put parameters on water use. Some parts of South Carolina are in a drought crisis right now, he says.

“You can set a parameter where a customer isn’t supposed to use more than, say, 100 gallons of water in a 24-hour period. The system can alert you if any customer goes over that parameter, so you can actually monitor for drought purposes.”

Same with irrigation purposes, he adds. “If you tell people they can’t irrigate, you can mark those meters as inactive. If someone turns one on, you’ll be alerted immediately that water is flowing through an inactive meter.”

It’s also done a lot to improve customer service. “If a customer complains about a high bill, you can break down their usage for them and pinpoint when there was a lot of water used,” says Huntley.

Customers learning more about their own water usage habits can help conserve water, Gray adds. Being able to see when and how much water is being used allows customers to better understand how (and how much) they use water.

Chesterfield County Rural Water Company began their installation of the system in August 2008, and it was completed in January 2009. Chesterfield’s installation began around Thanksgiving 2008.

One thing that Huntley would like to see with the system is the ability to turn water off remotely.

“We understand that’s an issue with battery life at this point,” he says. The battery is drained too quickly on the remote control, but Huntley hopes the next generation of batteries will be efficient for their needs.

Gray says he has asked to be put on a beta testing for the homeowners to have a thermostat-like programmable meter in the house to help them monitor their own water use.

“Say you don’t want to use more than 30 gallons of water a day,” says Gray. “You can program this device to set off an alarm if you go over that amount.”

Clark Public Utilities, Vancouver, Washington
In Vancouver, officials at Clark Public Utilities have decided to partner with Sensus Metering Systems to deploy a pilot program of the FlexNet wireless smart grid system.

Clark Public Utilities is a medium-sized utility, with 30,000 water services, as well as 180,000 electric services. When the utility decided it wanted to investigate AMI systems, it approached the market with a well-defined request for proposal, knowing exactly what they wanted to accomplish with the system. The utility then sorted through a number of vendors and took a two-step approach to the implementation.

Sensus was the vendor that was brought in for the pilot project, which included three data collectors (also known as tower gateway base stations) on existing Clark Public Utility tower assets: Two on radio towers and another on top of a water tower. Those locations provide radio coverage for a large service area, but the entire service area will not be covered until the pilot program is over and mass deployment is used. Radio coverage is redundant, meaning that meters are reporting to more than one destination.

Clark Public Utilities is deploying the pilot program for both the water and electrical services. Initiated in December 2008, the water meter readings are active as of late February 2009. During the pilot, Sensus is hosting the data center, but Clark Public Utilities will take over once the pilot is complete.

Like the other communities, the AMI system allows Clark Public Utilities to keep a more watchful eye on water usage and help cut other costs. The AMI system will allow utility companies to better meet the increasing regulations coming from state and federal utilities about conservation.

The Clark Public Utilities pilot program is a one-year program, and the utility will have a number of options on how to proceed. They can decide to continue with the mass deployment or try another program. The utility also has the option to add more gateway stations and meters.     

Author's Bio: Sue Marquette Poremba is a writer based in Pennsylvania.