As it's now in the public domain after my reading the following as an NSCUDD board member at the NSCUDD board meeting yesterday->
In my view and the people I have talked with, AMI is a more capable system than an AMR for water utilities and customers except for higher costs, greater complexities to install and longer length of time to implement. I can understand why a decision was made by staff and this NSCUDD board to go with a simpler solution that has lower costs. However, is there any way that all Village utilities can have a solution using amr that has a data collection rate closer to an AMI system to then achieve many of the benefits of an AMI system?
I understand that an AMR meter reading collection device weights about 15 pounds and is similar in size to a brief case. It’s receives power from a vehicles electrical system. It’s simple and easy to use with the need to only drive by all houses to automatically receive meter readings to the device.
The Villages is unique in that our community watch vehicles have a route that pass by every house three times a day. They then travel back to one of two Village facilities at the end of an 8 hour shift. While the main mission of the drivers is to observe and report, I am suggesting that in addition these vehicles might also be used to collect meter data for utilities using an AMR collection device located in these vehicles. For the public, this might further justify the high costs of community watch doing their regular job. And, Village Utility districts would pay them for doing so thus helping to reducing their large cost to the community. It’s a win win for both entities.
While this modified AMR system would not have instance access to data, taking three meter reading per day would be much better than have a meter read once a month. I am told that it currently takes one to six days for Jacobs to respond to a meter reading request by the Village billing staff which means a lot of time and water is wasted. The extra costs for us would be that of meter reading equipment in the vehicles, payments to Community watch and monies spent on software to collect, analyses, and then present to Jacobs, Staff and consultants the extra and much more current data to help better manage the Village utility systems. Modified software would handle which meter reading to use for billing. As an ex programmer, I know software can be adjusted to handle many different situations.
Thus, we could almost have an AMI data collection system using an AMR system as the base to form a hybrid system at a low additional cost and easy to implement. While not instance access, the meter data collected could be less than 8 hours old and not 30 days old as found in the typical AMR collection system. I hope everyone understand what I am suggesting and will be open to looking into this possible way to improve a AMR system using the Villages community watch vehicles as data collection devices.
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