Although some utilities are still reluctant to embrace AMR, those who have adopted the technology are more than satisfied with the results, and are enthusiastic about the medium’s potential.
Automatic meter reading (AMR) for water utilities has been around for a decade, but its acceptance has been slow and sporadic. Some water-system managers quail at the cost. Some question the equipment’s durability and reliability. Still others cite rapid technological advances, and have held back to avoid committing to an already-obsolete system. Yet, where such technology has been adopted, officials like the results.
AMR is an umbrella term that describes technology for reading water meters without having a person walk up to every meter pit, read the meter dials manually, and make notes. The first AMR products could read hundreds or thousands of pitted meters daily with a handheld device from a passing vehicle. Other systems allow continuous metering with a fixed radio-frequency data-collection system that stores and reports data to a utility’s collection center. Automatic meter integration or advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), is an advanced AMR technology that allows utilities and customers to monitor daily water use, and detect leaks and malfunctioning fixtures almost as soon as they occur.
The market for AMR and AMI comprises of about a quarter of the US water utilities, says Howard A. Scott, author of The Scott Reports, and managing director of Cognyst Advisors—a consulting firm in Pequannock, NJ. “There are 53,600 water utilities,” he says. “About 39,500 have fewer than 500 customers. The remaining 14,100 may be potential customers for AMR and AMI systems.” In general, Scott says, the nation’s 12,000 electrical utilities have more money to spend and are first to embrace new technologies, such as AMR and AMI, followed by the water utilities, with the 8,000 gas utilities lagging behind. (In some communities, a single entity provides two or all three of these services.)
AMR-metering devices can cost $130 to $180 for a meter and its smart endpoint or radio device, says Roman Thomassin, president of metering-systems provider Elster AMCO Water Inc, in Ocala, FL. “Two-way, fully submersible devices are now available for in-the-ground water systems,” he says. “Submersibility is costly, but these meters are designed to last a long time and they can be changed out.”
“With systems that use secure radio frequencies, collectors are positioned throughout an area, getting readings from individual meters,” says Laura Wainwright, product marketing manager for Aclara RF Systems. “Because more than one collector receives each reading, utilities do not have to worry if individual collectors are physically damaged for some reason, such as during a storm.
“Once the data is collected, it is sent on a regular schedule via a network to the utility,” she continues. “Different technologies are used to transmit the signal. Most utilities use cellular signals, but systems can also employ Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or fiber-optics.”
“Today’s systems must be able to leverage the latest communications technologies to ensure that the data is passed securely from the AMR network back to the utility in an efficient, power-conscious manner,” Thomassin notes. He says these technologies provide the utility with robust and reliable communications to ensure that their business-critical data arrives when they need it.
Watching and Waiting
Shawnee County Rural Water District Number 8 serves about 3,000 retail customers in a 30-square-mile area in northeast Kansas near Topeka. “We continue to use manual water-meter reading,” says Dennis F. Schwartz, general manager, past president, and current board member of the National Rural Water Association. “We have done some investigation of AMR, but selected nothing in the short term,” he says. “The interest, alone, on the investment required to convert would cost us substantially more that our current annual cost of having our meters manually read. In 10 to 15 years, when the meters need to be replaced, the cost will be $35 to $40 each, instead of $100 or more.
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| An example of a AMR pit installation |
“Our district places a high value on having a person visit every installation every month, to observe installation conditions and watch for possible problems,” he adds. “In my part of the world, meters freeze if left unattended in winter with misplaced or broken lids. We have no problem maintaining a competent and reliable meter-reading staff. We would get lazy if all we had to do was push a few buttons. Our customers enjoy interacting with our meter readers, and it helps to show personal service.”
Also, the AMR industry is still evolving and he wants to wait “for the best technology and lower-price position,” Schwartz says. “The problems early on were that, if you went to one system—became married to one manufacturer—you might be burning bridges with some comparable [AMR system]. Change comes slowly to the water business. It’s not wise to hitch my wagon to anything that comes along—I want to be certain before I make a decision.
“The capital cost for us to change to AMRs would be overwhelming—about half of our annual operating budget of just over $1 million,” he adds. “The last time we asked, the price quoted us was in excess of $100 per site. The actual cost would have been about $500,000, not including installation.”
Study Sans Deadline
Miami-Dade County, FL, is struggling to decide what—if anything—to do about AMR. With a land area of 2,431 square miles, Miami-Dade is larger than two states, Rhode Island (1,545 square miles) and Delaware (1,955 square miles). Its estimated 2006 population of 2,402,820 ranks eighth among US counties.
The Miami-Dade Water & Sewer Department (MDWSD), with 401,196 accounts, is seventh in total number of accounts in the 2006 Water and Waste Water Rate Survey, a biannual study co-produced by Raftelis Financial Consultants Inc, of Charlotte, NC, and the American Water Works Association in Denver, CO. In the survey, MDWSD is the fifth largest water utility nationally for service population, and the sixth largest for gallons of water sold, says Peiffer Brandt, vice president of Raftelis.
Frank Calderon, the MDWSD’s information officer, says it has 16 wholesale customers—cities that buy some or all of their water from MDWSD. The vast majority of county residents buy water directly from MDWSD or from one of its wholesale customers.
MDWSD is in the midst of an eight-year replacement schedule with Sensus meters, using both new and rebuilt meters, but not AMR, says Joseph A. Ruiz, Jr., director of operations for MDWSD. “Someone has to walk by and read meters, and then download the notes at our office,” he says. “We recently completed a request for information from 14 vendors; nine responded. We’re still waiting for additional information. There is no set date for the process to close, as we continue to evaluate information. As we try to decide what to do, technology and equipment are changing so fast that we want to make sure we don’t select a system that is antiquated before it is installed.”
MDWSD has listed 50 county parameters for AMR system performance, including 100% accuracy using a fixed network, a future annual growth rate of 10,000 meters, and special environmental conditions under which any meter system must perform. For example:
- Transmit readings if the meter is fully submerged under water. (The list doesn’t specify salt water, but it should.)
- Ability to transmit if the meter is covered in sand and dirt.
- Ability to operate reliability under extreme weather conditions of heat, cold, and humidity. (The list also should include high winds.) MDWSD already uses automatic meters for wholesale customers. “We read them with hand-held Itron FS3 computers, which we are updating to the newer model G5,” Ruiz says.
MDWSD estimates its December 2006 meter inventory at 434,559, with sizes from five-eighths inch through 10 inches. “Most residential customers use the five-eighths inch size,” Ruiz says. “Sensus Metering Systems made 85 percent of our meters, and Badger Meters Inc, of Milwaukee, WI, made the other 15 percent.”
MDWSD’s meters typically last about 20 years. “Our meters in pits need to be retrofitted or replaced, because of water and salt-water exposure,” Ruiz adds. “Electronic meter-reading devices have to be battery-powered. In our year-and-a-half of looking at these systems, we have seen battery life go from four to five years, then eight years, and now 20. We are trying to find out what is available and gather our thoughts, before we give someone $150 million of our customers’ money for meters and software to connect to our billing system.
“Billing our wholesale customers is easy,” he says. “Billing our retail customers has to be perfect and right every time. Any new billing system has to interface with an existing system that accepts bill payment by mail, by phone, online, with a credit card, and with cash walk-ins to the little corner store. We use the Enterprise Platform System and Wi-Fi (wide-area fidelity) for county laptops. The Wi-Fi system area served keeps changing. Our meters and Wi-Fi systems should connect. Wi-Fi for us is a real challenge given the county’s size.”
Getting Ready
Also evaluating AMRs is the city of San Diego, CA. The city’s Water Department manages a large and complex water storage, treatment, and delivery system. The water system extends over 404 square miles, serving nearly 1.3 million residents with an average of 210 million gallons of water per day. Water is transported in a system of various terrains, including 100 pressure zones through 3,280 miles of pipeline, to 270,000 residential and commercial accounts, and to the adjacent cities of Del Mar, Imperial Beach, and Coronado. Considered a semi-arid region, San Diego is the seventh largest city in the US and the second largest in California. Customer fees fund the department's $506 million annual budget.
“After extensive analysis, we plan implementation in late 2008,” says Delia Dee, supervising management analyst and program manager for AMR. “We have talked to different companies with multiple solutions. We have looked at mobile and fixed systems, as well as hybrid solutions.” Dee adds that cost figures for potential AMR systems in San Diego range over $10 million. “We’ll start deployment with commercial customers first, then study our findings, and, contingent on that success, we’ll then spread the technology to reach most customers in the most cost-effective way.”
San Diego now uses visual meter reading, and Dee says any new technology needs to be cost-efficient. “We have a very low labor cost, with 17 full-time and five supplemental meter readers. They work fast, but alone in sometimes dangerous conditions, including canyons and ravines, and accessing vaults in high-traffic areas downtown.”
The initial AMR implementation phase will include 27,000 meters—about 10% of the total, primarily commercial and vaulted meters, those with difficult access, and those requiring replacement due to age, obsolescence, or equipment failure. Private financing, not bonds, will cover the cost.
According to Dee, to make this a complete deal, their “RFP contains not only AMR technology, but also a means of financing the infrastructure improvements. “We established a committee, which I chair, of six water department employees, to evaluate proposals and select a system that reads meters with a low-failure rate, so we can get the most for our money and for our customers,” she says. “Other members are: a meter-services manager, a meter-reading supervisor, a customer-service supervisor, a telecommunications engineer, and an information systems analyst. It has been an interesting process—learning, analyzing the technology, and asking a lot of questions. I hear that the best part is when you start putting the technology in the ground. After that, things should move on smoothly and very fast.”
Expansion on Hold
Some pilot projects grow into full-scale acceptance, while others don’t. Into the latter category falls the Marin Municipal Water District, serving 190,000 people in a 147-square-mile area across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, CA. “We seriously investigated AMR for two years with a pilot program of 300 meters, using a drive-by system,” says Paul Helliker, the district’s general manager. “The pilot project cost 50,000 to 60,000 dollars.”
Those meters are still in use, but no more have been added, and the district hasn’t asked for proposals to go farther. “We continue to talk to vendors and ask for information,” he adds. “The cost for our utility ranges from 12 million dollars to 16 million dollars. We can make recommendations to our elected board of directors, but they must decide what we should do. They are interested in building a water desalination plant, which might take precedence over AMRs.”
A Rural Adopter
Many rural areas have decided to go beyond initial studies and begin actual implementation of AMR/AMI technologies to better manage their water resources. In Louisiana for example, two small cities have successfully switched from older meters to newer, automated systems. In 2007, the city of Opelousas, LA, initiated a program to replace older water meters with new digital encoder meters from Elster-Amco Water that include Aclara’s (formerly Hexagram) Star Network fixed-network wireless technology.
In Layton City, UT, an almost decade-old program involved the replacement of about 12,000 meters with units from Master Meter. These Dialog 3 meters utilize wireless technology, allowing the utility to use drive-by data collection.
Another early adopter is the Big Horn Regional Joint Powers Board in Worland, WY. When the city began planning its water distribution system a decade ago, AMR was a crucial part of the puzzle. Now a meter reader drives monthly through an area 20-miles long and five-miles wide, with a dispersed rural population of about 2,500 to read their battery-powered AMR water meters.
“We are using meters from Sensus Metering Systems Inc, of Raleigh, NC,” says John Joyce, the board’s contract manager. “In our first phase, our contractor purchased and installed about 250 AMR meters. Currently, we are installing 400 new AMR meters for the Washakie Rural Water Company, a member of the Big Horn Regional Joint Powers Board.
“We’re proud that in our region the rural areas are leading the cities,” he says. “Some of our battery- powered meters are now 10 years old. We’ve replaced some batteries, which had a five-year life expectancy. We did our research ahead of time, and had to sell the Big Horn board; now it is just done. We get one bid that includes everything. Our employee uses a handheld reader, which he plugs into a computer in our office to download the information to our billing software.”
Adoption Under Duress
Due to a multi-year drought and two federal-court consent decrees, the Atlanta, GA, Department of Watershed Management is using AMR technology to help conserve and manage its potable water resources. The department serves the cities of Atlanta and Sandy Springs, and the southern suburbs in unincorporated Fulton County—a 650-square-mile area with almost one million people (about 20% of Metropolitan Atlanta’s population). “We are ending the first year of a three-year project to replace all of our residential meters with AMR technology,” says Janet Ward, public relations manager.
Atlanta draws drinking water from the Chattahoochee River. Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue mandated everyone holding Chattahoochee River water withdrawal permits to cut their usage by 10% from December 2007 to March 2008. Atlanta users met the governor’s request. In early January 2008, even with some much-needed rain, Lake Sidney Lanier was “almost 20 feet below its 1,071-foot ‘full pool,’ reported a news release from Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. “We all need to begin to see conservation not as a temporary inconvenience, but as a way of life,” Franklin says.
Ward agrees, remarking that “Atlanta faced a series of droughts dating back to the 1980s. They seem to be getting worse, and longer,” he says.
The Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper (UCR), an environmental advocacy organization, sued Atlanta for polluting the Chattahoochee River. That led to the consent decrees, and Atlanta’s commitment to overhaul its sewer and water system. “The work is being done under our $3.9 billion Clean Water Atlanta program,” Ward says. “We are inspecting every inch of our sanitary-sewer system, identifying links and damage, and replacing all damaged pipes. Atlanta has old brick sewers dating to the 1860s. We’re using all forms of pipe-replacement technology, including pipe bursting, pipe lining, and open cut. Construction of new water transmission and distribution lines is underway. Replacing water mains is expensive, because they require open-cut construction.”
Construction began as early as 2000 on some projects that should be completed by the end of 2008. Work under the second-consent degree began in 2001, and should end by 2014. Sylvia Glover, water utility manager, says Atlanta had installed 32,000 of a planned 150,000 new AMR meters, by December 2007. “Our pilot program began in December 2006,” she says. “Full implementation began in January 2007, for a three-year program. We outsource meter reading. Our meter-reader subcontractor took the job knowing about our plans. In July 2005, four contractors responded to our request for proposals. A committee that evaluated and ranked the proposals in August 2005, included an outside consultant and employees from billing, customer service, distribution, and meter reading. The contractors made presentations, and we visited sites where they had projects.
“We’re using Neptune Water Meters from Neptune Technology Group Inc, in Tallassee, AL,” Glover continues. “We did not select Neptune; the contractor who won the contract selected the meters. We are retrofitting meters less than eight years old, and replacing the older ones. We understand there will be upgrades to the equipment we are purchasing. We have acquired a post-warranty maintenance agreement for our handheld and mobile data collectors. All of our meters are in sidewalk pits, and the meter and batteries for the meter interface units (MIUs) connected to the meter and the antenna, are covered by a clear epoxy solution to keep water out.”
Fixed networks installations are scheduled by December 2008, in downtown Atlanta, at City Hall, the Georgia State Capitol and other government buildings, the Georgia Dome stadium and major downtown hotels, and at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. “In these areas, we are using standard fixed installations with meters, MIUs, and antennas,” Glover says. “Information will be collected daily. Commercial customers in these locations will be able to log on to the city’s Web site with a password to review their daily water-meter readings. We included the airport, because access there has become very difficult since 9/11.”
A Committed Adopter
The 30-mile-wide Las Vegas Valley Water District provides water to more than one million people in and around Las Vegas, NV. Since 2002, the district has installed 328,500 AMR units. “In 2001, we ran a small pilot project using Firefly Datamatic AMR units from Datamatic Ltd. Energy Systems in Plano, TX,” says J.C. Davis, district information coordinator. “Large-scale installations began in 2002. These were not replacement meters. We attached the Firefly units to existing meters made by various companies, including Neptune and Elster AMCO Water, Inc. Since we started, there have been software upgrades to our Firefly receivers, but the upgrades have not created any challenges.
“Now we’re just installing spot locations and units on new meters where necessary,” he says. “Future growth over the next five years is not predictable, because new accounts have fluctuated dramatically over the past 18 months, due to the housing market instability.”
Collection equipment is mounted in district vehicles, and employees also have hand-held collection units in case of signal interference, such as a car parked in front of the meter. A jump-drive transfers collected data to Datamatic software in the office. Then, it goes to the billing department.
The Future
Slowly, water utilities are installing various types of meter-reading systems. Some, like Shawnee County, will wait as long as they can while watching the spread of AMR and AMI systems elsewhere. Each community must determine for itself when acceptance of such systems has become economical feasible. As the need to monitor drinking water grows, the ability of these new metering systems to monitor daily water use and detect usage anomalies will make them increasingly appreciated; but, as long as the new systems remain very expensive for communities that already are metered, officials may lack an incentive to change from their manual reading methods. Perhaps if utilities are offered financial help, they will move sooner to these more expensive AMR and AMI systems. Perhaps, as in Atlanta, some external pressure will be necessary to bring about this change.