[twoplanekid]

It’s a beautiful time in the Villages so who cares? The NSCUDD board has been given the task of accepting or rejection a staff proposal to spent over 20 million to replace water meters. As sometimes is the case, we are presented with the proposal to study seven days before our board meeting. A set of metrics was established by Jacobs, staff and Vikus to determine the best choice of water meter systems. That’s ok but our customers were never asked for their opinion and to my knowledge the NSCUDD board was never asked to help establish metrics yet alone participate in the study.

I understand that there is a fine line between the actions of staff and the board. The board should not micromanage but still have some degree of participation on major projects. The board does have the final say but I do not like to delay projects that have taken a lot of time by staff and others to develop.

It will be an interesting meeting to hear the give and take between all participants. If interest, please attend the NSCUDD board meeting this Monday, April 8th at 3PM at the SeaBreeze Rec Center. I wish you a beautiful time in the Villages.

Click below for the agenda

Public Portal • CivicClerk

[Bill14564]

I really wish AMI had come in at a comparable cost to AMR. I really want the ability to track my water usage by the hour (or at least the day) on a daily basis. I want to be able to see any high readings on either the residential or the irrigation so that I can identify a problem on day one rather than receiving my bill and learning I have had a problem for a month. AMI would enable that, AMR does not.

[Altavia]

Originally Posted by Bill14564

I really wish AMI had come in at a comparable cost to AMR. I really want the ability to track my water usage by the hour (or at least the day) on a daily basis. I want to be able to see any high readings on either the residential or the irrigation so that I can identify a problem on day one rather than receiving my bill and learning I have had a problem for a month. AMI would enable that, AMR does not.

Agree, also from a water conservation perspective.

[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.

[Bill14564]

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.

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.

[twoplanekid]

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.