For most utilities, multiple reasons for improving data collection capabilities add up to a go decision to implement AMR.
Talk to any water utility manager, and you’ll never get just one reason why automatic meter reading (AMR) upgrades benefit both utilities and customers. Whether it’s a matter of investing a transition to touch read, radio read, or fixed network, managers are more likely to cite all manner of reasons—revenue/cash flow, reading efficiency, conservation, and customer service—than just one. Still, in speaking with
Water Efficiency recently
, several managers usually listed one particular motivation for system adoption as first among equals.
Revenue/Cash Flow and Customer Service
The City of Augusta, GA, has received a high return on its investment in the installation of 7,000 new meters between 2003 and 2006. The utility, which serves 67,000 customers, recently focused on improving its operating margins in reading its most inaccessible meters, 6,000 of which were commercial/industrial accounts that consume the highest volume of water. The utility acquired the new meters from Badger Meter Inc. The meters are equipped with Itron Inc. wireless technology, allowing meter readers to collect data from a distance, whether on foot or from a vehicle.
“The reason we [focused on] commercial/industrial was mainly due to the fact that it was where the highest revenue impact would be because we replaced all of the meters,” reports Steve Little, Augusta’s assistant director of finance and administration. “We didn’t just convert meters to AMR—we put in brand-new AMR meters. We probably went from an average of about 90% accuracy based on preliminary samples to 97% accuracy.”
Improving the efficiency of meter reading was the means to improving cash flow for Tacoma Water in Washington state. The utility is experimenting with a fixed-network AMR system for 450 of its meters to determine if the improved cash flow and profitability from accurate billing and leak detection will justify an upgrade of all 97,000 meters throughout the system—or at least all meters in Tacoma Water’s outlying areas.
The decision to use a fixed-network Itron Inc. system was easy, according to Tony Lindgren, project manager for Tacoma Water. “We found that the money you spend for a drive-by system as opposed to a fixed network system is relatively similar,” he says. “You’re still putting the endpoints on the meters, and you still have to have a collection device, whether it’s in a truck or on a pole.” But “are you getting more information by driving by? When you have a fixed network, you can get the daily/hourly reads that benefit the system even more.” Besides giving the utility the flexibility to bill monthly, the new system features powerful analytical tools that determine the likelihood of leaks and tampering. These data can help customer service representatives proactively help customers conserve water. “Let’s say someone says, ‘My water bill is twice as large as it usually is,’” says Lindgren. “The customer service rep can look at the consumption and say it was nonstop for two days, and [the customer might say], ‘Oh, I was filling my pool.’”
Bob Rider, superintendent of technical services for the City of Cumberland, MD, is eager to reap the benefits of a fixed-network AMR system for the city’s 10,000 accounts spread across about 40 square miles, having used touch-read and radio-read collection previously. A Sensus Metering Systems FlexNet system that will be completely implemented by mid-2008 will provide the utility with powerful data from four reads a day and allow monthly billing and leak detection.
The system utilizes a local radio-frequency network and a regional network interface that stores data transmitted by FlexNet transceivers between meters and Tower Gateway Base stations located on existing radio towers.
“The biggest thing we want to do is go to monthly billing,” says Rider. “The biggest complaint I hear is the size of a water bill—not many people budget for quarterly billing anymore. It’ll be really nice to go to a monthly bill and help out our customers tremendously.” Many customers are located in difficult-to-read areas, and the new system will greatly aid data collection from their sites.
In addition, Rider notes, the system will help customers through leak detection. “Currently, if somebody calls, there’s a three-month period there, and we’re trying to figure out what happened. That’s hard to do, especially if it’s something that could have happened where you left a hose running or you had company over.” When fully implemented, the FlexNet system will be capable of sending a signal indicating abnormally high use; for now the system produces a report when usage exceeds the average based on the last several reads.
Not only aging water meters poorly accurate and thus a liability in terms of conservation due to poor accuracy—that poor accuracy can also cost a utility a great deal of money. The Truckee Meadows Water Authority (TMWA), a collaborative effort among the Cities of Sparks and Reno and Washoe County, NV, has been replacing its old meters over the past 12 years and has seen a major increase in revenue as a result. Required to use water meters according to a settlement with the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe—which is located downstream from the TMWA service area—the TMWA has gained tremendous data collection efficiency benefits and increased revenue from the use of new Badger meters equipped with Itron radio-frequency (RF) technology.
John Erwin, director of resources, planning, and development for the TMWA, cites a 1991 public law mandating the TMWA’s use of water meters as a condition of the right to store water in a reservoir owned by the federal government to use during droughts and that the tribe would use for fish recovery in non-drought periods. “From 1995 to 2001 when the TMWA was formed, we started installing meters with the ERTs [electronic radio transponders],” Erwin notes, adding that radio-read AMR was just beginning to emerge when the upgrade reached a wide scale. “Because the staffing was not going to be there to hire another 20 meter readers, it made sense to really expand the program and have nothing but electronic meters throughout the whole system.”
With the upgrade of about 90,000 meters nearly complete by late summer 2007, Erwin notes that drive-by collection capability is allowing the TMWA to obtain all of the data in only 20 days per cycle. Perhaps most importantly, the TMWA estimates that the new system will generate an additional $250,000 in annual revenue. “We started installing meters in the ’80s and none of those meters was ever changed out,” says Erwin. “When we became the TMWA, we worked on an aggressive meter replacement program. A 20-year-old meter is a revenue loser because [old meters] read less than 100%—usually around 88%, 85% accuracy. This has been a really good thing for us; it gets accurate data to the reader, and it improves our financial situation as well.”
Meter-Reading Efficiency
Water utility managers for the City of Zachary, LA, have discovered that a technological upgrade is more cost-effective than outsourcing the meter reading function. The city, which serves 6,200 customers in a 20-square-mile region covering Zachary and East Baton Rouge Parish, previously had meters read by two city employees as well as several more from a service at an annual cost of more than $65,000. It used to take three workers about a week to read the city’s older water meters.
From 2003 to 2006, Zachary retrofitted 7,000 commercial/industrial and residential meters with Master Meter units that transmit signals to a data collector wirelessly. The time it takes to read these meters has been reduced dramatically; in tests, one meter reader has collected data from 1,200 meters in two and a half hours by driving by instead of walking up to each meter. “We used to have four billing cycles; we have two now, and there are a lot fewer re-reads,” notes Chris Davezak, public utility director, adding that the need to estimate bills has been nearly eliminated. “The system actually detects leaks, and it also detects tampers in case somebody is tampering with the meters. We had about a 15% to 30% loss before—it’s probably down to 2% or 3% now. As we’re going down the road, we can tell if a customer has a leak. We can knock on the door and say that we’re showing a leak.”
As a utility’s service area grows, maintaining billing cycles can become more difficult, and it might be necessary to hire additional meter readers if older means of collecting data are used. For a smaller yet growing community such as Willmar, MN, an investment in more advanced AMR technology can head off these kinds of problems, according to Larry Heinen, customer service supervisor with the City of Willmar. In 2000, the city began using walk-by data collection and then began to upgrade to a Datamatic FIREFLY system that allows for mobile collection starting in 2005 to service its 6,500 accounts. By late summer 2007, Willmar had upgraded about 4,000 of its meters, and Heinen expects full implementation within two years.
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Photo: Lake Arrowhead Community Services District |
| Reducing the number of days to read meters reduces costs. |
Previously, it took two readers an entire month to read the meters, Heinen says. “We’ve probably added 1,000 more connections since 2005,” he adds. “We were pushing the envelope with these two people, and we were looking at hiring at least another reader to keep up. We bill in cycles—four different times a month—and we were getting closer and closer to those due dates before the readers would get done, and we didn’t know if we’d have to hire one more guy.”
As of late summer, the city had reduced the amount of time it takes to read all of the meters to a combined 23 days, eliminating the need to expand the staff and keeping the billing cycles on track.
One would be hard-pressed to find a water district more difficult to monitor, at least from a billing standpoint, than the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority (FKAA) that serves the Florida Keys and about 47,000 customers in Monroe County, FL, via a 130-mile-long water pipeline and 649 miles of distribution pipe. Previously, 26 meter readers working out of three offices had to obtain water-use data.
Carl Brewster, FKAA director of information technology, relates how inefficient it is to obtain meter readings in one area of the district using the walk-up method. “We have one island where the meter reader has to wait for a ferry to read 95 meters, and his wait time is anywhere from one to three hours,” Brewster says. “We’re looking at almost one man-day just to read 95 meters.”
Things are looking up for the FKAA, however, since it began upgrading its entire AMR network with the Neptune ARB (Automatic Reading and Billing) Utility Management System in October 2006. The system will incorporate new meters and registers that will allow the FKAA to read data using a combination of Neptune’s mobile, handheld, and fixed-network data collectors.
Brewster says that improved efficiency is not the only benefit to the implementation of the new system, in which three of five phases were complete by late summer 2007 and should conclude by 2011. The system incorporates powerful leak-detection capability, a major benefit, given the logistical challenges that the district presents. The ARB system incorporates Hexagram STAR technology, which detects leaks, reverse flow, and tampering. “From the date we began installing the new encoders with leak-detection capability, we started recognizing some benefits,” says Brewster. “We’ve been notifying our customers as we installed those meters of leaks, and that’s been to a great benefit to us from a public relations standpoint as well as a conservation standpoint. As we continue to move forward with the project, those data will be made available to our customers via our Web site—they’ll be able to monitor consumption.”
In a large city like Dallas, it makes sense to test out technological upgrades before rolling out a systemwide implementation. Dallas Water Utilities, which serves 300,000 accounts, 1.2 million people, and another 1 million people in wholesale customer cities throughout a service area of 699 miles, needed to improve the efficiency of meter reading at many of its large commercial accounts. So in spring 2007, it began a pilot project in which it is retrofitting 7,300 meters with Itron’s Water Fixed Network 2.5 system by the end of 2007, an upgrade that will simplify and speed up reading of meters and aid conservation efforts in the city’s Deep Ellum central business district.
Vicki Reed, assistant director of business with Dallas Water Utilities, anticipates that the new system will dramatically improve reading efficiency in this concentrated area compared with the touch-read system used previously. “We tried to get into a concentrated area,” she points out. “In this area, the cooling tower meters sometimes had to be read by the owner and sent to us, and the ones with confined spaces had safety issues in addition to the time it takes to read them. We thought we’d get those in, see what kind of data we get, and see how the system works, and then we can do a business case to see how we can take it forward.”
By making reads more often, the system aids conservation efforts by giving the utility an earlier warning about possible leaks. Two system tools, leak management and tamper analysis, provide powerful data that can prevent water loss. “I think it’ll help, one, from a customer service standpoint where we’ll have more up-to-date read information; and also we can get a report from the system that might indicate where customer usage has gone up and doesn’t match historical standards,” Reed says.
As of December 2006, a water meter changeout program was long overdue for the City of Atlanta, which supplies 1 million residents with water service. The city launched an ambitious replacement of about 150,000 meters in its service area with meters from Neptune Technologies Group and automation technology from K&V Meter Automation, a joint venture between KHAFRA Engineering Consultants Inc. and VSI Meter Services Inc. The new system will allow mobile data collection for most accounts, except for a fixed network that will collect data from commercial accounts located at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
“With airport security, 9/11 is always an issue these days, whether you’re trying to travel or get in and read the meters,” notes Sylvia Glover, project manager with the city, who expects the project to be complete before the end of 2008. “The fixed network also gives us the capability in terms of our commercial customers to receive daily readings, and we also have the capability to upload those daily readings onto our computer system. So if need be, we would have those readings available for our customers and perhaps have a log-on for our customer connection somewhere on our city Web site, and a customer could go in, enter a password, and check out their account and monitor their water usage.”
The entire system will aid both conservation and customer service improvement efforts, Glover adds. “We’ve got a large number of meters that we know are under-registering, and this AMR project gives us the capability of putting our new meters in and increasing our revenue. You take that human element out of it—the over-reading, the under-reading—and hopefully we’ll increase our customer confidence and our ability to bill them more accurately.”
The City of Opelousas, LA, is gaining data-collection efficiency by replacing its old water meters with new digital encoder meters from ElsterAMCO Water and incorporating Hexagram STAR System fixed-network wireless technology. The STAR system consists of permanently sealed meter transmission units (MTUs) that are connected to water meters. The MTUs read data from the meters at intervals as short as five minutes and transmit the data to any of multiple data collector units (DCUs) located throughout the service area. The DCUs, in turn, transmit the data to a STAR System Network Control Computer (NCC) located at the utility. The NCC provides the utility with comprehensive account information relevant to billing, customer service, and operations functions.
The new system will eliminate the need for manual reading of water meters serving 7,600 residents of Opelousas and surrounding areas. The project-management and installation contracts were awarded to Triton Water Technologies, a company that works with municipalities interested in self-funding improvements to their water and wastewater infrastructures via meter replacement and AMR installations
Eliminating the need to expand the meter-reading staff will be a major benefit of switching from Sensus’s TouchRead system to the FlexNet fixed-network system for the Village of Los Lunas, NM. The utility began upgrading to the new system in early 2007, and Greg Wortman, water utility supervisor, expects to complete the implementation on the village’s 5,600 accounts by spring 2008.
“As far as manpower is concerned, it is going to free up a lot of operators who head into the field who are getting this on the radio read now,” he says. Additionally, “[Conservation] is a key [consideration]; everyone’s always worried about water conservation. The other one is manpower; there’s no one who really needs to go out into the field to get any kind of data as far as readings are concerned. With the FlexNet, you can get a reading every four hours.”
From a technical standpoint, Wortman and the village are also enjoying a major advantage of the system: a streamlined meter-to-receiver configuration that has allowed piggybacking of the system onto the city’s recently installed wireless network. The FlexNet equipment is located on the same site as the wireless network, saving Los Lunas infrastructure costs.
Conservation
In a rural resort community such as Lake Arrowhead, CA, a town at a 5,600-foot elevation that is located about two hours east of Los Angeles, the efficiency benefits to be gained by implementing AMR are obvious, but conservation can be a major motivation as well, explains Marc Lippert, customer service supervisor for the Lake Arrowhead Community Services District. “We’re about a 50% vacation community,” Lippert says of the city with about 7,600 water customers. “Water conservation was a big deal; we wanted to find leaks faster. When we have any snow on the ground, we do a snow bill—an estimated bill. The problem with that is that sometimes we don’t read a meter for six months.”
Lake Arrowhead needed to replace many of its meters anyway, having installed most of its units about 15 years ago to allow touch reading. For this upgrade, the district selected Datamatic FIREFLY technology, which was used for 1,500 retrofits and on about 6,000 more new meters. The technology allows drive-by data collection, a major advantage in such a spread-out district. “With this radio read, we’ll be able to get readings when there’s snow on the ground,” says Lippert. “There are people who are gone all winter and could have a leak at their property, and we wouldn’t know that for six months. Now, we have a mechanism to go out and actually search for leaks during freeze events.”
Not only will the new technology allow monthly billing, Lippert adds, but it will also facilitate better customer service. “What I envision is that we will do water-use profiling on a case-by-case basis,” he says. “If someone asked us to come out and do a water survey of their property and go over their water-use history, we would run a water-use profile for that property before we went out to the house and have that in hand to show the water-use habits of that particular site.”
When Lee Dennis “L.D.” McMullen thinks of the potential of advanced AMR technology, he envisions a cooperative water conservation effort between water customers and utility managers. The chief executive officer of Des Moines, Iowa, Water Works (DMWW) envisions that when the Hexagram STAR fixed-network AMR system is in place for the utility’s roughly 99,000 accounts throughout four counties in central Iowa by the end of 2008, customers will be able to view their water use online for monitoring purposes. “We’re going to be adding that to our large industrial accounts next, and our anticipation is that within the next two years we’ll have that capability for every account,” McMullen notes. “We think that will answer a lot of our customers’ concerns about ‘Why is my water bill high?’ They’ll be able to see that ‘Oh yes, that’s right; that’s when Aunt Susie and Uncle James came to visit us, and you can see that high water use that weekend.’ Plus, we think it does a good job of helping people understand the amount of water they’re using and use it wisely.”
The STAR system utilizes meter transmission units mounted on customer meters that read the meter data and transmit them via a Federal Communication Commission–licensed wireless network to any of several data collector units located throughout the service area. Using a variety of back-haul communication networks including fiber-optic, wireless, cellular, wire-line, and Internet protocol, the DCUs in turn transmit the data to a network control computer that validates, processes, and stores the data for use in billing and customer service reports.
The system will be a major improvement over a telephone-based AMR system that DMWW installed on about one-third of its meters between the late ’80s and early ’90s. The proliferation of cellular technology use made the old system less than completely reliable, so it began implementing the fixed AMR network in 2003. “A lot of times, a house is changing hands,” he points out, adding that the stop meter reading for the previous owner and start meter reading are the same. “But there are also periods of time before the new owner comes in, and there may be somebody out there doing maintenance or repair and who may be using water, and they don’t tell us that they will be using water, and the stop and the start won’t be the same. To get away from a problem or a potential conflict with the new customer, when they call us and say that they’re taking possession of the house on a particular day, we will get another read on that day. If there is a difference between the readings, then we will do investigations, find out who used the water, and bill them appropriately.”
A community served by DMWW, the City of Clive, IA, is also implementing the STAR System for its 6,000 accounts—an upgrade that was about halfway complete by late summer 2007. Bart Weller, director of public works for the City of Clive, says that the system will eliminate inaccurate readings and the need for walk-by data collection, as well as help the city manage growth in the future. Once the system is fully implemented, Weller adds, any new accounts will bear the cost of the new meters, relieving the financial burden on existing customers.
Layton City, UT, faces a similar situation to many growing but cash-strapped communities when it comes to increasing staff to provide city services. Earlier this decade, Layton City completed a replacement program for about 12,000 meters for the dual purposes of water conservation and reading efficiency, says Paul Applonie, assistant public works director. “It was a combination between conservation—we had a lot of unaccounted-for water—and so that we didn’t have to hire an additional person,” he says.
Layton City opted for Master Meter DIALOG 3G meters that are equipped with wireless technology and combine the RF unit with the water meter register. The utility can use drive-by data collection and read all of the meters in its service area with two individuals instead of six to eight that the task would otherwise require. Conservation is aided by the system’s leak-detection, backflow, and tampering alerts. The staff is alerted when water usage exceeds the historical amount. Also, “If it runs over 24 hours straight, it also sends a notification out with the signal,” says Applonie.