Roughly 60 miles south of Chicago, IL, lies the Village of Chebanse, which up until recently had no metering system.
Foth Infrastructure & Environment LLC, a civil engineering company, was selected to help the village choose a suitable system for this community of approximately 1,148 residents. Foth engineers helped Chebanse understand that regardless of the number of occupants within a household, every residence was currently paying the same flat rate on their monthly water bill. No customers were being billed for their actual water usage under this method of billing.
A comparative study was conducted that analyzed an array of manufacturers with various metering technologies. Prior to making a decision, various factors were taken into account such as meter types, drive-by technology and a variety of fixed network schemes. After careful consideration, the Village of Chebanse chose Master Meter as the preferred water meter supplier because of the company’s multi-jet meter and its ability to record commonly occurring small leaks.
The company’s 3G Mobile™ Drive-By AMR and register end points enabled the water utility to capture consumption and alarm data from the multi-jet meter system. The “plug-n-play” design is free of wires – often the leading cause of corrosion and long-term maintenance issues. The absence of connections help decrease tampering, vandalism, maintenance hassles, and other problems related to wired systems.
The installation of 450 multi-jet meters began in early 2009 and was completed three months later.
While the village had considered fixed network technology from a data timeliness perspective, the benefits were overshadowed by the added cost and burden of additional infrastructure. 3G Mobile offers the same functionality from alerts, to meter read synchronization, and two-way communication found in most fixed network systems.
