Seventy-five percent of Clarendon’s water meters have been replaced in the last week as the city nears completion of the first stage of a USDA-funded infrastructure project.
City Administrator David Dockery said replacement of residential meters will likely be completed this week. Larger commercial meters will take a bit longer, but installation, training city staff, and testing meters will be completed within 30 days.
The new electronic meters are expected to save the city time and labor and will record more accurate readings of water usage.
“It currently takes five men two and half days to read all the meters,” Dockery said. “These meters will be read by one man in one to three hours.”
The smart water meters will transmit a signal up to about a thousand feet, allowing a city worker to drive down selected streets in town to read all the meters.
“After they have been in for a while, they learn what the normal consumption is for a home or business,” Dockery said. “It will then long an alarm if the usage is abnormally too high or too low and alert the reader when the meter is read.”
The meters also recognize if water usage is stopped or reversed and can store information for more than 30 days.
“It can tell us what day, time, and amount water was used,” Dockery said.
Joshua Garrett of Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the installers working in Clarendon for contractor UMS and says he can change out a regular meter on a one-inch line in about five minutes. He likes the electronic meters because of the data they can record and their accuracy.
“These measure down to 100th of a gallon,” Garrett said.
Dockery said the city’s old meters – some of which have been in service for 40 years – can only report water usage per 100 gallons or per 1,000 gallons.
The 900 new meters, which cost $416,000, are expected to pay for themselves through labor savings and increased accountability. They will have a 20-year service life with their lithium batteries, which are fully guaranteed for the first 10 years with a prorated warrantee in the second ten years.
“We selected this particularly brand of meter because it only transmits data when it receives a signal to do so,” Dockery said. “Other brands transmit continuously at certain times, which makes a difference to battery life.”
Dockery also said when the water meter project is completed, he intends to redirect the labor previously spent on reading meters to repairing streets.
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