Case Study: Water Works Board of the City of Auburn

The City of Auburn, AL, is a prosperous city of 43,000 people located halfway between Montgomery and Atlanta just off I-85 in eastern Alabama. It is home to the renowned War Eagles' Auburn University, which has an annual enrollment of 22,000 students. A large of number of these students change addresses frequently increasing the number of final and special meter reads required.

The Challenge

As Manager of the Water Works Board of the City of Auburn, Tony Segrest was faced with the challenge of reading meters in an ever-increasing number of student housing units. With the constant turnover of residents, it was becoming harder and harder to keep up with the demands of reading the meters.

The Auburn Water Works Board is responsible for the water distribution within the city. Approximately 95 percent of the system's 16,000 meters are residential. Many of these residential meters are installed in pairs in a common meter pit, which restricts the space for an automated meter reading system. Neptune's answer - the Dual R900 Pit Meter Interface Unit (MIU).

Given its proximity to Neptune's Tallassee facility, the Board has worked with the company for many years assisting with product development. The R900 radio project is a perfect example. In 1998, 100 R900 wall MIUs were installed for testing. The wall units were mounted on 2 inch PVC poles at apartment complexes and in industrial parks. The pit MIUs were later installed in meter pits. The metallic antenna of the R900 pit MIUs permitted the installation of the MIUs in driveways or roadways where necessary, without fear of undue wear and tear.

Encouraged by the results of the test, Tony and Rex Griffin, the Director of the Water and Sewer Department, visited Pasadena, TX, in July 2000 to see the Neptune R900 system in a full deployment. Pasadena had equipped all of its 34,000 meters with pit R900s and was reading them with a Neptune drive-by system. As a result, Pasadena reduced its meter reading labor costs by more than 80 percent and improved the efficiency of its system by more than 85 percent. Convinced that the system would work in Auburn, Tony began the RFP process for a complete meter changeout to a radio-based meter reading system.

The project "go ahead" was given to Neptune in the Spring of 2001 and the installation began. The project was completed in February of 2002. Approximately 12,000 meters were changed out to new Neptune T-10 meters equipped with ProRead absolute encoder registers while the balance of 4,200 existing T-10 meters (which were less than 5 years old) were retrofitted with new ProRead registers.

Almost 75 percent of the meter population is installed two meters in a single meter box. The meter box lid would not accommodate two R900 pit antennas; therefore, the Dual R900 MIU was installed. The Dual R900 allows two networked ProRead registers to be wired to a single RF MIU. This feature allows for easier installation, thereby significantly lowering the overall cost of the project.

The Board utilizes the Neptune EZ Drive drive-by data collector to read its meters. The EZ Drive works with the existing host software, EZ RouteMAPS, which the Board used with its handheld meter reading system. The transition from the walk-by system, manually keying in readings, to the drive-by system was easily accomplished.

The Results

With the implementation of Neptune's radio frequency automated meter reading system, the Auburn Water Works Board has reduced its monthly meter reading collection time from 720 man hours to just 64 - an improvement of more than 90 percent. The city will realize even more improvement as the driver becomes more familiar with the performance of the drive-by unit and the R900 and determines the best routing.

There has been a significant decrease in the number of calls to the service center concerning over-reads and estimated bills simply because all of the readings collected from the R900s are accurate - there are no incorrectly entered readings.

Additionally, the Board has seen a 2 percent decrease in its unaccounted-for water due to the higher accuracy of the new meters. This is an added bonus because it was not included in the Board's internal justification for the system.

According to Tony, "The Auburn Water Works Board has realized major savings in our daily operating costs with the implementation of the Neptune drive-by system. We have reduced read-to-bill times, lowered operational costs, and improved customer service. Our last reading cycle produced a success rate of 98.9 percent. We are very pleased with these results."