Quote:
Originally Posted by dtennent
Since moving here over ten years ago, I have been amazed that our water is being read by such an out dated method. If we are going to spend money to update our system, why aren’t we moving to the more advanced technology. Not that it is brand new, I ran into it when my town was planning on a new water district in 2011. The ability to measure water usage on a daily basis would allow either the utility or the customer to see significant increases in water usage. This would be good on both a macro and micro scale for water conservation.
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From the study, the determining factors appear to be cost and ease of use for the customer. There were several factors involved but to me, those seem to be tilt the scale.
The study predicts AMR will save about $800K/year due to needing less labor to read the meters. Instead of walking up to each meter, a vehicle drives down most of the streets and the meters are read automatically. The study predicts AMI will cost nearly $200K/year. I believe this is for the cost of the required cellular service plus periodic replacement of the transmitting devices. Overall, this would be a $1M/year savings for AMR over AMI.
The study puts it more tactfully but with something like 70,000 customers, many less than tech-savvy, a great deal of time is anticipated to assist with understanding AMI dashboards.
So AMR will require less replacement to implement, less cost to read and maintain, and less work to support the customer base than AMI would.
I still would prefer AMI but it is hard to make the argument to spend $1M every year in additional fees to guard against the two times in six years that I've had a high-usage month.