How are Governments Investing in Advanced Metering Infrastructure & Automatic Meter Readers?

As far as emerging technologies and automation go, many governments and public works entities have gone high tech, or have feasibility studies in progress, associated with water metering processes. The relatively recent technologies introduced by manufacturers includes radio-frequency identification (RFID), residential ultrasonic, fluidic oscillator, residential magnetic and others. These words seem like they should be linked to a science-fiction flick, not water meters/utilities!

Rare is the day I do not come across an article, anecdote, or opinion about, 1) utility billing errors, 2) government X purchasing and deploying a new technology. In partnership with these developments, we located a number of government bid requests for these newfangled solutions.

Why are governments changing? Prevention of inaccurate readings which lead to billing errors, decreased frustration of consumers and staff, revenue increase, fewer missed leaks, detection of outages, decreased tampering, automation of meter reads. The new technology has been tested, is real world proven.

What are the costs? Of course, there is an investment in replacing the old, installing the new, educating consumers, and training staff. Estimates suggest that the new systems will pay for themselves in a few years. What have you heard?

What is in a leak? To make the math easy, nobody said there would be math! A single leak in one meter, a 0.10 gallon per minute (GPM) leak, is 4,320 gallons in a month, 51,840 gallons in a year. Mechanical meters are incapable of detecting flows (leaks) < 0.05 GPM. Dried up lakes Batman!

Most estimates I have seen contend that an average person uses 80-100 gallons of water per day. For a little more perspective, an Olympic-sized swimming pool holds ~660,430 gallons of water. In sum, leaks are not good.

U.S. and Canadian governments are acting to the tune of 753 associated bid requests in the past twelve months. 753 in one year! Today, this second, there are 21 active bid requests with “water meters” specifically in the bid request title. Contact us at the below to review these bid requests and bid documents.

Thanks to Sensus, here is a helpful Advanced Metering Infrastructure diagram.

Sample Active Bids/RFPs

Surveillance

For more information and details about these bid requests, call us at 888.808.5356 or visit BidPrime.