As water utilities continue to roll out Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), success stories continue to roll in. At first, it was typical to see fast results in the areas of water loss, but more managers are reporting benefits for many other operations. And as we’ll see, now municipalities are discovering new options for leveraging and sharing AMI network access across multiple utilities. So let’s take a look at some examples of successful AMI implementations and how they were achieved.
Leesburg, VA
For Leesburg, VA, a high-growth town located west of Washington DC, much of the utility’s success is defined as solving the problem of non-revenue water. Leesburg chose a STAR Network system from, Aclara, Hazelwood, MO, to replace its legacy touch-read system. The system employs 450–470 MHz radio frequency signals to transmit meter data from the meter to data collection units (DCUs). The data collectors send the readings twice a day to the utility via cellular phone.
According to Lesley McClaughry, executive associate, Town of Leesburg, Department of Utilities, getting complete information about their system’s operations was important. “When we first started looking at radio read networks, Aclara came in with the option of an AMI solution and the benefits were good,” recalls McClaughry. “They did a propagation study and figured out where the 18 network towers needed to be. We have some on buildings, on light poles, and on schools, and a couple on some water tanks.”
The towers transmit information back to the utility two times a day, reporting hourly consumption data that is accurate to the nearest 10 gallons. Since the network went live in 2004, Leesburg has reduced non-revenue water from 15% to 7%. Moreover, the system provides daily data to identify service line breaks and intermittent usage spikes that may indicate customer problems, such as an open flapper valve in a toilet.
Until recently, the utility notified customers of problems by letter, or by leaving a door hanger. But as of January 2015, customers can opt-in to receive automatic high water usage alerts on the town’s Customer Self Service Portal. When signing up, customers set the threshold daily usage amount at which they will receive an alert. Alerts are sent via either e-mail or text message when usage exceeds the designated threshold. “The alert goes out every morning at 11 o’clock,” says McClaughry. “If they’re over their threshold or their usage spikes, we let them know that they have a problem.”
Tallassee, AL
Reaping AMI benefits for customers has been an ongoing process for the Billings Public Works Utilities (PWU), Billings, MT. The PWU read its water meters manually until 1992, when it installed telephone-type meter interface units (MIUs) from Neptune, Tallassee, AL. In 2003, an upgrade to R900 radio frequency MIUs ushered in handheld readers; then progress continued with the addition of MRX920 mobile data collectors. In 2012, to help customers with leaks or excessive water consumption, the PWU looked at Neptune’s R900 Gateway fixed network data collectors as an option to move from one reading per month to daily multiple meter readings.
Since completing the implementation of the R900 Gateway System, the PWU completes its off-cycle reads without rolling a truck. But the savings don’t stop there. Billings is now deploying Neptune’s new enhanced R900s that feature a 1-watt power boost for readings from meters in difficult locations. “The PWU is also taking advantage of our N_SIGHT software,” says Tracy Nuckles, marketing product manager for Neptune Technology Group. The N_SIGHT software suite comprises three modules that work together to address meter reading, customer service tools, and analytics needs. Neptune’s E-Coder equipped meters provide the data for the N_SIGHT software suite’s analysis “engine,” which identifies leaks, backflow, and days of no flow.
“Major reverse flows or backflows and continuous leaks are very important for utilities to act upon, and with this
system, continuous leaks and reverse flows can be responded to with automatic notification via email,” says Nuckles. “We also integrate with Esri’s ArcGIS mapping software, so utilities can see their assets and overlay their distribution lines on top of our map layer to analyze their entire system. That makes it easy to create virtual district metering zones so you can analyze your billed versus your pumped water.
Neptune has integrated SAP’s business objects reporting module to provide utilities with the flexibility they need. “The reporting module lets customers modify and create their own reports from scratch,” explains Nuckles. “If, for example, they want a report every Monday at 10 o’clock, they can schedule it and it’s waiting at their desk in the morning.”
Beauregard Parish, LA
The ability to start with a small pilot was the strategy for success at Waterworks District 3 of Beauregard Parish, LA, according to Jeremy Joffrion, distribution manager for District 3. “When the Beacon AMA-managed solution came out I went to the utility board with the intention of only reading the hard to read areas,” Joffrion recalls. “They gave me the authority to do 10 meters and I scattered them throughout the parish systemwide. I showed them the difference in revenue and the board voted to do a systemwide approach. So we’re installing 100 a month on a six-year program.”
Beauregard Parish is mostly rural, with its 7,000 customers spread over 1,200 square miles. The aging system had many inefficiencies, including the burden of a third party to manually read meters. On average, it took three people more than 12 days to collect the readings, at a cost of about $2 per meter. Joffrion liked the BEACON AMA system from Badger Meter, Milwaukee, WI, because it offered an immediate solution that worked with cellular endpoints, plus an easy-to-use hosted software product that delivered fast, near real-time data.
A hosted network and managed solution lets a utility concentrate on running their operations, according to director of utility marketing for Badger Meter, John Fillinger. “As a manufacturer and supplier we take on the software and other components,” says Fillinger. “So if they don’t have the expertise, this solution of a cellular end point can allow a utility to deploy them at any point in time. If you compare it to a traditional fixed network, you would have to put up a gateway with all the time and expense. A cellular end point allows the utility to put in as little as 10 or less and see how it works. For example, maybe you have commercial accounts spread throughout a residential area. You could put some of the cellular endpoints on those accounts and forgo the residential, because you’re not doing any infrastructure. So this is a pay-as-you-go system, with significantly less cost. And whether you only want to put in 10, or a thousand, it still justifies the investment. But the more you deploy, the more the returns.”
So far, Joffrion has found that using a cellular network offers a lot of flexibility. “We are concentrating on getting troublesome places done,” he says. “Such as behind fences and locked gates. Or homes with pets and other headaches, so we’ve finished most of all those. For the month of March we’re targeting churches and hunting clubs in the system. We had a hunting club last week that had a leak and used 380,000 gallons of water. Normally their water bill would be about 30 or 40 bucks a month. So I’m sure we’ll be hearing from them. A lot of this area down here is farmland, and people grow soybeans and ranch cattle. We have two dairies within about 15 miles of our headquarters, down from five years ago when we had seven or eight dairies.”
For replacement meters, the District selected Badger’s high resolution E-Series Ultrasonic engineered polymer meter line. E-Series Ultrasonic meters use solid-state technology in a compact, totally encapsulated, weatherproof, and UV-resistant housing. They’re equipped with an easy-to-read, nine-digit LCD display.
“Our guys in the field install the meters and then I log them into the computer’s network,” says Joffrion. “It takes just five minutes to install an antenna onto a meter and they bring me the paperwork for the meter’s longitude and latitude, plus the end point number and customer information—then it takes me about five minutes to enter everything.”
Small and medium sized utilities appreciate the fast ramp up process, adds Fillinger. “As units are installed and the endpoint is activated, somebody on the inside can see the communication immediately,” says Fillinger. “So within a few minutes they know that the endpoint has successfully made communication with the network, and it’s confirmed that the installation has been done correctly. And if you have installers trying to get inside a house, you don’t want to have them going in there multiple times.”
Madison Water is leveraging hourly usage
information to detect possible leaks, improve
customer service, and quickly resolve bill inquiries.
Another benefit is the freedom to focus on larger revenue sources. “You can look at it as the 80/20 principle where 20% of the meters are responsible for 80% of the revenue,” says Fillinger. “So it makes sense to concentrate on that 80% of the revenue and come back and get the others later. If you change out meters and increase accuracy the revenue gain from just those meters and the incremental data, the improvement is substantial. So making the change and concentrating on those meters can upgrade the entire system, and when you look at the large meters of commercial accounts there’s a opportunity to capture revenue that can pay for the deployment of the entire system.”
Madison, WI
Capturing the benefits of conservation was a key factor in the success of using AMI for Project H2O, the Madison, WI, program to automate the collection and analysis of water meter reads. The Madison Water Utility (MWU) chose an AMI system from Itron, Liberty Lake, WA, to provide its 235,000 residents an upgrade from biannual meter reads to monthly meter reads. Also, the new system measures consumption in gallons instead of cubic feet, making bills easier to understand. Additionally, customers can view hourly water usage information online. Moreover, the solution addresses the City’s need for improved metering accuracy, as well as leak and tamper detection. According to MWU general manager, Tom Heikkinen, over 20 years, the system will pay for itself in reduced operating costs.
With so many benefits, MWU assumed that the city’s residents and politicians would welcome the new system, but according to Robin Piper, customer service manager, Madison Water, it’s wise to be prepared to sell the project multiple times. “Just because you’ve convinced the ‘powers-that-be’ that we need to do this and there’s money in the budget, don’t assume that once they’ve given their blessing there isn’t something that could happen and cause them to change their minds, or question whether they want to go through with the project,” says Piper.
Customers can be equally fickle. Piper recalls that some customers were concerned about the technology and the fact that they weren’t as involved as they should have been in making the decisions the utility made for them. “We made a tactical error in calling this a smart meter project,” says Piper. “We can’t shut them off remotely, yet we called them smart meters, although they’re pretty dumb. But when somebody Googles smart meters they get all these horror stories about the electric meters. You can’t compare the water meters to smart meters in the electric industry—it’s apples and oranges. Even though our general manager didn’t want to offer an opt out clause for our customers, we had a dozen or so that filed a complaint with the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin to stop the project completely. The commission didn’t require us to have an opt-out policy, but politically we had to come up with something to satisfy those customers. That delayed our implementation about three months.”
A more focused public relations program could have helped, and Piper anticipates renewed efforts in that area. In the meantime, the utility can offer some good news about the system’s ability to reduce non-revenue water. “We have a telemetry system that’s tied into our meter data management software and our plan is to valve off areas of the city to look at the volume of water pumped out of the ground, and it would show the non-revenue water which runs between 8–12% annually. We’re talking about 10 billion gallons of water per year, so one billion of that is non-revenue. We could have leaks that we don’t know about, so this will help us compare water in versus water out, and system distribution leaks.”
Monaca, PA
One billion gallons of non-revenue water is a significant amount, but on the other hand, at 10%, it’s not unusually high for an industry plagued by aging infrastructure. But what if the numbers were reversed, and your utility estimated that 50% of its water usage disappeared as non-revenue water? Such was the case in the Borough of Monaca, a small community of roughly 6,000 people, just 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, PA.
According to Borough Manager Mario Leone Jr., a smart water network solution from Sensus, Raleigh, NC, has stemmed the losses, and contributed to the success of his community’s sustainability efforts. The solution involved replacing 2,438 water meters and deploying the Sensus multi-application FlexNet system, its fixed base communication network with advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and its Permalog leak detection product.
It didn’t take long for the leak detection system to pinpoint a major problem; Monaca’s 14th Street spring and waterfall is a long-standing distribution line rupture mistaken for a landmark. The system’s leak detection alerted the Borough to the spring’s true nature, plus eight others, within days of being deployed. The rupture gushed at more than 200,000 gallons of water per day, and Leone estimates the loss at about 1.46 billion gallons over two decades.
“The leak detection has been a nice tool for us,” says Leone, “We’ve reduced our losses from 50% to 15%—I don’t know how utilities can operate without it. But one of our biggest problems was that we were still manually reading our meters with paper logbooks. So improving the efficiency of the reading had a great impact, and then of course, with the older meters they were losing accuracy. Another benefit came when we saw through an analysis on our accounting records that we originally thought we had 2,232 meters, but that wasn’t correct. When we started deploying and changing meters we found that we still had a lot of houses that needed meters beyond that number. It was about another 250 meters for properties it didn’t have them. That was a huge benefit.”
Labor savings has also contributed to the project’s success. Before moving to AMI, it took three staff members from the water department 30 days to do the reads. During that same period, an additional staff member took an entire month to enter the meter reads into the system. Now one person accomplishes the entire process in 15 minutes.
“It’s important to look at the savings and efficiency gains for your staff,” Leone adds. “When my staff were spending a month doing data entry, they weren’t out doing other tasks that were neglected, such as maintaining pumps and checking equipment. Those are hard things to put numbers on, because how do you know when a piece of equipment failed because it wasn’t maintained? Also, there are the personal injuries from meter reading. I had a meter reader go into a basement and he had wet shoes and slipped on the steps. He dislocated his shoulder and was out for nine months. So what was the loss there?”
Up to this point, Monaca has maintained the system on its server, now going into the fourth year of operations. But Leone is looking at moving to the Sensus cloud-based network when their server reaches the end of its life cycle at five years.
For the future, Leone sees the AMI network contributing even more to Monaca’s sustainability efforts. “Sensus just came out with a new technology that allows our network to control our streetlights,” he says. “So I have a system that was paid for by the water utility, yet it allows me to control the streetlights and dim them for conservation, and blink them for emergencies. This shows the advantage of leveraging the technology, and how it’s growing.”
JACKSONVILLE, FL
Leveraging technology was a benchmark of success for Florida’s Jacksonville-based Jacksonville Energy Authority (JEA). To avoid monthly meter reads in the field for its 305,000 water customers, the JEA invested millions of dollars into AMI. Although the payback was good, the not-for-profit community-owned utility also serves 420,000 electric customers, and it saw an opportunity for more value from its investment. In 2009, JEA was awarded a $13 million Smart Grid Investment Grant by the US Department of Energy, with the utility contributing matching funds. JEA’s Smart Energy Project started with the installation of two-way smart meters, supporting communications infrastructure, a web portal for both water and electric customers and an upgraded meter data management system (MDMS).
It was a substantial upgrade, but to achieve the goal of offering additional services and giving customers more control over their electricity and water use, a platform that could interface with the utility’s legacy systems was the next step. This meant a complex integration project, tying together an Oracle billing and customer information system, mobile workforce management system, outage management system, geographic information systems, asset management and distribution planning systems, and Landis+Gyr metering infrastructure.
Pole-mounted Data Collector
According to Brian Novak, JEA program manager for Advance Metering Systems, the utility needed a Meter Data Management System (MDMS) that could utilize out-of-the box integration points that would work with the legacy systems. After considering different vendor technologies, JEA selected Siemens’ eMeter EnergyIP platform as its MDMS because the platform is agnostic—interoperable among various systems—with flexible architecture to address both electric and water resources. Novak notes that the integration went smoothly, and that the biggest lesson learned was to make sure that all the parties involved are going to be with you throughout the entire process.
All told, we’ve seen AMI pilot programs with as little as ten meters—and major rollouts with thousands of meters. Small or large, they share many of the same benefits: reductions of non-revenue for water in the distribution system, leak detection for retail customers, and operations efficiencies for staffs and equipment. Now, with the advent of network sharing and integrating MDMS across multiple utilities, the pace of AMI success stories will accelerate even further. So it’s good news for those utilities that are ready to start, and those with legacy systems that are ready for additional benefits.
