AUBURNDALE — Within eight months, 8,800 old-fashioned manually-read water meters at homes and small businesses will be replaced with new digitized meters that rely on cellular technology.
And 4,686 electronic meters that had been upgraded in the past six years will be retrofitted with new hardware.
Monday night, city commissioners OK’d spending $2,634,137 for the long-planned purchase of the meters and for paying a contractor to install the meters.
Public Works Director John Dickson and Deputy Finance Director Ryan Williamson explained the proposal.
“Currently, it takes two to three weeks to read all the meters and errors happen,” Williamson said. And, it can take up to 30 days to discover a leak.
The new system will provide uniform electronic meter reading, streamline the billing process making use of now-under-utilized aspects of the city’s existing software, and provide automatic audits of water usage, Williamson said.
And customers will be able to download an app that allows them to see their water-usages day-by-day and even hour-by-hour, Williamson said. Typical usage has peaks when households are running the water, doing laundry, showering, irrigating the lawn and so on, but continuous usage indicates a leak.
Even if a homeowner has not downloaded the app, a city worker gets an alarm indicating households where there may be issues during the past 24 hours and can notify the homeowners. Together, they can look at usage and figure out what is happening, averting a big bill for the customer, Williamson said.
Because the project has been in the city’s capital improvement program for five years, the city has been accumulating funds for it. In 2015-'16 fiscal year, the city included $3 million for the project when it saved money by refinancing a public utility bond. The current year’s budget allocated $3.5 million for the project, which will cover the $2.6 million allocated Monday night and $865,862 for related costs, such as replacing boxes, valves and other equipment.
A city staff analysis said the city could save money by continuing to use the same brand, Badger, meters. In addition to the old meters that are read manually by city workers, there are more than 4,000 meters that are electronically read on a drive-by basis. Using Badger will allow the city to simply upgrade the electronic-read meters with cellular technology hardware rather than replacing the entire meter, Dickson said.
And, Badger can make use of the “existing cellular infrastructure versus the city having to construct numerous towers and related maintenance,” he said.
Badger will charge $1,649,342 for the new meters and $480.831 to retrofit the electronic meters.
City staff, after researching several vendors with experience installing and retrofitting Badger-brand meters and registers, recommended going with Utility Metering Solutions of Houston.
That company agreed to allow Auburndale to piggyback onto a contract with West Monroe, La., using the same unit pricing from a 2016 contract.
In addition to the installation costs, using the cellular network will cost the city approximately $125,000 a year, Williamson said.
Commissioner Dorothea Taylor Bogert asked what will happen if the cell towers go down, and Dickson explained that the information is stored for 42 days in the individual registers so even if it is not immediately transferred from the cell tower to the cloud to the billing software, the data will be available.
Commissioner Bill Sterling asked whether individual customers may see changes on their bill. Dickson said that as meters get older they slow down, so bills favor the customer. The new system will accurately reflect current water usage so many customers may see their bills go up.
Marilyn Meyer can be reached at marilyn.meyer@theledger.com or 863-802-7558.