Itron Inc. has reached an agreement to provide the City of Ft. Wayne with technology to automate data collection from 75,000 water meters in northeastern Indiana.
ABB Water Meters of Ocala, Florida, has been selected as the lead contractor for the automation project and will provide 65,000 new ABB absolute encoder water meters equipped with Itron automatic meter reading (AMR) modules, as well as project management services, to the City of Ft. Wayne.
United Metering of Harrington Park, N.J., will install 55,000 of the new AMR-equipped meters, and the City of Ft. Wayne will install the remaining 10,000 new ABB meters and upgrade an additional 10,000 ABB meters already in the field with Itron AMR technology. The majority of the meters will be automated over a period of one year.
Once the system is deployed, Ft. Wayne meter readers will use vehicles equipped with Itron computers and radio frequency (RF) transceivers to collect meter data simply by driving past the metered property, eliminating the need for meter readers to access customer properties.
