Hello!
For background, I work in a county GIS department and our county is taking over the water system of a small local town. It's our first time running a utility as far as I know. I have been tasked over the past few months with mapping out the water system as best we can, short of digging it up, and there was not much solid information to start with. I mapped all the valves, hydrants and water meters with GPS and did a bit of connect-the-dots in combination with local knowledge and record drawings for water lines.
Now the time is coming up for our guys to take over meter reading duty. There is no remote/radio reading, it's all done manually. It was done by the previous operators by following a printout that is sorted by account number, this number determines the route taken. Many of the meters are in alleys behind houses, it is difficult to determine what meter goes to what house in many cases, so following the printout seems vital to keeping track of where you are and what meter you are reading.
This method seems to be very dependent on local familiarity and somewhat inefficient. Does anybody know if this is the general method for water utilities to read meters manually? My task right now is to create a map book to assist water meter reading and my concern is creating something that will actually be useful and not just garbled pages of dots and numbers. My initial idea was to have somewhat large-scale pages (1"=100' maybe) with meter points connected by a leader to the account number labels, overlayed on a lightened (for contrast) aerial photo. But I'm still in the initial design and was wondering if anybody here could share their thoughts on how to go about this.
Thanks,
Ryan