Water meter reading

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12-20-2010 01:42 PM
RyanKelso
Occasional Contributor III
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
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8 Replies
JoshHumphrey
New Contributor
Ryan,

I am not sure the funding you have available but check with sensus meter company they have a program called AutoVu/AutoRead this reads all meter from a labtop so essentially one guy could read your entire town.. Also this program requires lat/long coords to reference the read out therefore giving you a point position on your GIS software.  If you have any more questions feel free to email me josh@poweshiekwater.com
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RyanKelso
Occasional Contributor III
Josh,
Thanks for your reply.  That solution would definitely be the best and I think we are looking to do something along those lines in the future.  Unfortunately we do not have the time or funding for a system like that right now, which is why I am tasked to make a map book to aid meter reading.
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JoshuaDamron
Occasional Contributor III
I had a similar situation in our city where we lost our meter reader and therein lost route knowledge.  Thankfully we had just completed mapping the meters in our GIS.  In our case the handheld unit which the meter reader carried automatically prompted the meter reader with the address & serial # of the next meter.  As you mentioned old water utilities are and ancient and imperfect world with a portion of the meters not located at the standard sidewalk location. To assist our new meter reader I took the same method you are contemplating and made up maps to help him find those obscure meters.

The maps I made were just as you are describing: faded black and white aerials with water meter points. I found that water valve/hydrant/main locations were confusing to the meter reader and obfuscated the map.  I also found that labeling serial #�??s got way too complex and weren�??t necessary as the hand held unit had all that data anyways. 

I made a grid with MapBook (now known as data driven pages), I think the original maps were 24�?�x36�?� at 1�?�= 80�??-100�?? scale, later I made up a smaller set of 11�?�x17�?� at 1�?�=160�?? scale because 24�?�x36�?� was to big to be reviewed in the cab of his truck.  He found that it was unrealistic for him to carry the maps with him while reading meters and he only needed the maps for reference the first few times he did a route, really to note where the remotely located meters were.  He�??d give the maps a once over to get his bearings or when he couldn�??t find a meter he made a note to review the map and come back later.  Pretty much the maps sat in his truck and after those first few months they were junked.  

All this to say you are going in the right direction!

As your county maintains and upgrades the water infrastructure you may look into Itron meter data collection technology, we in Public Works use Itron ERT's on our Badger water meters and the electric dept. uses them as well (http://www.itron.com/pages/products_category.asp?id=itr_000269.xml)
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JoshuaDamron
Occasional Contributor III
I realized I ddin't actually answer all of your questions


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.


There is no right way to read meters, and I wouldn't sweat the maps too much as most of the meters are in standard locations and after 6 months of reading the towns meters maps won't be needed till a new reader is trained.

In our small town as I mentioned above we read meters manually.  Our city has been working for some time now to upgrade our meters to Itron electronic radio transmitters (ERT's), these typically have a battery life of 10 years or or more and make the task of reading much quicker.  As building permits come in or we repair meters they get upgraded with ERT's. 

The ERT's allow the meter reader to push a button on the handheld and get a meter's read from up to several hundred feet away; we are discussing moving to meters that "bubble up" so the meter reader doesn't have to push anything just be in range, of course this impacts battery life.  There are many versions of ERT's.  They can allow you to just drive around town and never leave the vehicle, some can notify if the property has a leak in the private system, some interact with a wireless network hence the meters are read automaticly and therein can give hourly use readings.

Manually reading meters has some value that is often overlooked: that is having a concerned employee who is positively interacting with the public daily in their neighborhoods and noticing things that may be out of place.  For instance we educated our meter reader on storm water quality issues and he has been invaluable in that he observes situations and brings them to our attention.  Also there is value to having a city employee physically observe the condition of your infrastructure regularly.
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RyanKelso
Occasional Contributor III
Thank you for your replies, it is encouraging to know that I'm going in the right direction from somebody who has been through a similar project.  I also appreciate your insights from your experience, you confirm some of my thoughts such as the map book really only being needed to assist a new meter reader on the first few times around.
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PatrickOMalley
New Contributor
I agree with most of what has been said, especially about the maps. My personal experience comes from a small water utility, and is based on utility operation first and GIS second.

Meter reading sheets are normally generated by your utility billing software, and the meter serial number is the key piece of information for the meter reader. It is what the reader confirms before taking a reading. The customer address is secondary, because some meters are in those odd locations you mentioned. The sheets often include last month's reading and maybe average usage for the customer so the reader can do a common sense check on the new reading.

Billing software provides ways to customize the order in which meters are listed on the meter reading sheets, but most meter readers don't provide the office with enough feedback about what would be ideal for the order of the list to get optimized. Instead the meter readers get very good at flipping pages on the reading sheets to match the order in which they actually read the meters. It makes training a new reader more difficult, but works fine for an experienced reader.
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JoshCarroll
New Contributor
Ryan,
I work for a utility with around 81,000 water meters we use map books for our commercial routes only because the location of the residential meters is pretty standard, and the routes are sequenced so that the meter reader walks from one meter to another.  One advantage of having the map books is that we don't have to assign the same routes to the same meter reader each month.  We also tend to have alot of turnover with our meter readers and the maps help to bring the new meter readers up to speed.  If you would like to see some examples of our maps I'd be happy to send a couple to you.
Josh
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RyanKelso
Occasional Contributor III

Meter reading sheets are normally generated by your utility billing software, and the meter serial number is the key piece of information for the meter reader. It is what the reader confirms before taking a reading. The customer address is secondary, because some meters are in those odd locations you mentioned. The sheets often include last month's reading and maybe average usage for the customer so the reader can do a common sense check on the new reading.


Ah, thanks, it did occur to me that this would be a good way to do it and it's nice to know that some utilities do it this way.  I need to get the serial number database up to date.

Ryan,
I work for a utility with around 81,000 water meters we use map books for our commercial routes only because the location of the residential meters is pretty standard, and the routes are sequenced so that the meter reader walks from one meter to another.  One advantage of having the map books is that we don't have to assign the same routes to the same meter reader each month.  We also tend to have alot of turnover with our meter readers and the maps help to bring the new meter readers up to speed.  If you would like to see some examples of our maps I'd be happy to send a couple to you.
Josh


Thanks this is some good input as well.  I appreciate your offer and certainly wouldn't mind seeing an example of yours however, I've finished our map book and the system operator seemed quite happy with it.  We've got less than 400 meters so my task was certainly less complicated!
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