The City’s water rates are set at a level where the City can cover it’s cost of producing water, transporting it to your house and handling the necessary meter reading and billing costs. Anything we can do to reduce our costs at any point in this production and consumption cycle will save us, and more importantly our customers, money.
Over the last two decades we’ve consistently invested in new technology in the area of meter reading because meter reading has a well deserved reputation for being a labor hog. Water line breaks can be labor hogs too, but they bring direct value to the customer so we consider that time well spent.
As you might imagine it can take a long time to physically walk the City reading water meters on a house by house basis so we’ve tried to stay current on technology advances. You can’t run a water system without meter reading but the time it takes to read the meters doesn’t have any inherent customer value so we consider less as much more.
That’s why we’ve been transitioning the old fashioned meters to phone line meters and now to radio meters. With each upgrade in technology we save time, and in this case, time is money.
Here’s a summary from Gene Roberts that he scripted to answer a resident’s questions about the status of water meter reading in Kent. Gene starts with a reference to the budget that has been set up to buy more modern meter reading technology. As you can see there is nothing cheap about upgrading the meter technology which is why we’ve been spreading it out over many years.
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The 1995 Budget reported:
“Meter Replacement Project which consists of replacing the existing meters throughout the City with meters that can be read through the phone lines. The cost savings are estimated to “pay back” this project in five years.”
The 1995 Budget estimated cost for the Schlumberger metering system was $1,130,000. With an approximate 5,800 meters in service circa 1995 the cost to change out each meter would have been in the neighborhood of $195 each. The reason that an exact amount can not be established for each property is due to differences meter sizes being needed at each property resulting in a slightly different cost for some properties. The installation of residential meters in 1995 required the addition of a backflow device as required OEPA, which for the City was incorporated in the body of the new residential meters. The non residential customers had backflow prevention device installed prior to the meter upgrades in 1995, as required by OEPA. Upon implementation of the 1995 backflow meter replacement project it was determined that the plumbing code required expansion tanks be installed with the backflow meters which required an additional expense of $180,000 or approximately $31.00 per property bring the final average install cost to $226.00 per customer.
The reason that water meters are changed is studies have shown that a meter records less than the actual water flowing through the meter overtime. The decrease in recorded flow is due to the mechanical operation of the meter creating wear of the moving parts of the meter resulting in recording less flow than what is actually passing through the meter. At the time of the 1995 changes the American Water Works Association recognized this problem and provided a recommended standard of changing meters every 10 years. A more current study reported that for a thirty year old meter the flow registered by the meter would be 82% of the actual flow passing through the meter.
The reduced flow recorded is not linear with time but with the total flow passing through the meter resulting in increased wear of the meter parts. Therefore a customer using a larger quantity of water on average will have less flow reported at a given age of a meter when compared to a customer using a lesser quantity of water on average whom will have a more accurate flow recorded. The result of this difference between large versus small flow usage equates a small flow demand users will pay a bill more representative of their actual usage where large flow users will be paying for less of their water actually used overtime.
One study reviewed reports for a given community the optimum age at which meters should be replaced would be at the end of 16-years which pays for the cost of the meters being replaced in the first five year of installation just based on the accurate recording of water flow resulting in increased revenue. However, the optimum age at which replacement of meters should occur is not a standard based either on the meter type or manufacture but is more directly related to multiple conditions ranging from meter location, chemical composition of the water and variation of temperature and humidity which cause the decay of the water meter recording capability.
It was this loss in recorded flow which drove the meter replacement in 1995. At the time the B&F Director advised me during the startup of the project in 1995 most meters in the City were 10 plus years old and were not recording the actual volume of water used but some lesser amount. Although I have no documentation of the calculations used to report the payback time of 5-years for the meter replacement project I can report that the metering system in place in 1995 required that each meter be manually read which at the time required six Central Maintenance Service Workers four days to go sequentially property to property reading each meter. The data collected would then be downloaded by B&F Utility Billing Account Clerks and entered into the City’s billing computer to produce each individual bill for property owners.
The phone read system eliminated the vast majority of the time required to manually read each meter in the City. Most of the meters in the system where changed to phone read except in a few case where meters were mounted in locations which did not have hard wire phone accessible. The system was designed to use hard wired phone lines at each property to obtain the data from each meter and record the data directly into the billing computer thus saving the meter reading and billing staff time. This savings in time was equivalent to hiring one additional employee in the Central Maintenance Division.
What has happened since 1995 requiring the current meter head updates is the decrease in number of properties which have hard line phones through AT&T. The current number of customers provided water service in the City is approximately 6,600. This number is constantly in flux as properties become vacant and then become reoccupied plus the addition of new structures requiring water service. Of the 6,600 customers in service there are less than 1,000 which are read by the original 1995 phone read system. What has occurred starting circa 2000 was the drop off of phone read capable properties at a rate varying from a low of 200 per year to a high of 800 per year. This decay in the ability of phone meter read required the update of the meter heads to outside read compatible and reads to be made manually again. The manpower to manually read the meters at the peak of the hard wired phone disconnects (circa 2009) was 6-routes 5-days or 30 man days per month an increase of 6 man days from the 1995 reading routes. This increase is due to the increase in the number of meters to be read but equally the non sequential reading; not going to each property but instead skipping properties requiring more time to verify proper addressing to ensure correct meter being read. The problem described also created a large number of customer complaints due to the increased number of estimated reads. Utility customers like to pay for what they have used and not based on an estimated bill calculated on past usage history.
In 2009 a concerted effort started to upgrade the current inventory of manual read water meters to radio read meters. This process does not require removal of the meter if it is found to have been replaced in 1995 or is determined to be defective or reading an incorrect volume of water. The process does require removal of the current backflow meter read heads and replacement with an updated head which is radio compatible and installation of the radio transmitters. Once fully deployed the radio read system will require one staff one day to read all meters in the City which equates to again gaining one additional employee to start to decrease the back log of work in the Central Maintenance Division.
The cost for the conversion from phone read to radio read is the cost of the meter head, the radio transmitter and staff time to convert totaling less than $100 per location on average. For the approximate 800 customers remaining on the phone read system this equates to $80,000 of which the City has received a NOPEC grant for $73,162 to offset the cost of the remaining phone read meters replacement. The cost of the phones read systems that have been previously replaced have been spread out in the budget from year 2001 through 2008 by using maintenance funds and additional funds provided of approximately $65,000 per year for 2009 through 2011. The total cost estimated to complete the radio read conversion for all users is $660,000 spread out over 10-years at an average of $66,000 per year.
