New water meters save time, offer more accuracy
The City of Hollister is completing the automation of its water
meter-reading procedures, a move designed to reduce human error and
to transition customers from a bi-monthly to a monthly billing
cycle.
Last month the City Council approved the purchase of 3,125
automated water meters and equipment that will allow water division
personnel to enter information into computerized data collectors so
the information can be sent electronically to the finance
department. The cost of the new water meters is $705,790, which
comes from the water division budget and from the city’s Water
Enterprise Fund.
New water meters save time, offer more accuracy
The City of Hollister is completing the automation of its water meter-reading procedures, a move designed to reduce human error and to transition customers from a bi-monthly to a monthly billing cycle.
Last month the City Council approved the purchase of 3,125 automated water meters and equipment that will allow water division personnel to enter information into computerized data collectors so the information can be sent electronically to the finance department. The cost of the new water meters is $705,790, which comes from the water division budget and from the city’s Water Enterprise Fund.
The Council also approved the hiring of four seasonal workers to help with the meter installation.
Over the past four years, the city has replaced and automated approximately 3,000 of the 6,100 water meters in its system.
“The project as a whole will reduce labor in reading meters, make the process more accurate and get us to a point of monthly billing which … should save the city money,” Community Services Director Clay Lee said.
The previous process of manually reading non-automated water meters required four full-time city workers to each spend four days per month walking around the city and entering data from the meters into handwritten logs, Lee said in a report to the City Council. The data was then given to finance department staffers to enter into the computer system.
“The process was time-consuming, took staff away from regular activities and programs of the water division and was inefficient because of the human error factor of reading water meters and data entry that led to numerous re-reads each meter-reading cycle,” Lee said.
City workers still have to travel the routes to collect water meter data, but the automated readers send a signal that is picked up and automatically entered into the data collectors, so water division staff could drive by the meters and input information from an entire neighborhood in a short amount of time.
“There is still some (potential for) human error involved with the manual meter reading,” Lee said, “but the step of the manual inputting of data from the logs to the computers by the Finance Department staff has been eliminated.”
The seasonal workers hired by the city are scheduled to spend the next six months completing the installation of the upgraded meters at a rate of 30 meters per day.
Lee estimates that it would take 32 “person days” to read all 6,100 water meters in the city limits. When the system is fully automated in early 2009, it will take two staffers approximately three days per month each – or six person days – to read all of the accounts.
“With this savings of labor, staff time will be redistributed to other programs on which the water division has not been able to focus,” Lee said, including water valve exercising and maintenance, hydrant flushing and well site maintenance. “All of these activities are important to a smoothly functioning water system.”
Another benefit, according to Lee, is that all of the city’s water meters will have been changed over the past five years.
“This is significant because the standard life expectancy of a meter is approximately 15 years before replacement is necessary,” he said in his report to the Council. “To our knowledge, the city has never had a program to systematically replace meters.”
Instead, they were replaced after problems with accuracy were identified. Lee said the city does not know how many of its current meters have exceeded their life expectancy.
