Located in Fort Bend County just 20 miles southwest of Houston, the City of Rosenberg, Texas, is home to a population of nearly 32,000. Developed in the 1870s and 1880s as the junction point of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific’s Victoria Division railroads, Rosenberg and its surrounding Brazos River Valley attracted many from across the country with fertile land for growing cotton and fruit orchards. The city was officially incorporated in 1902, with its public utilities established a few years thereafter. As of September 2010, the water and wastewater department serves 7,076 single residential; 1,291 Industrial, Commercial, and Institutional (ICI); and 233 irrigation accounts.
For nearly a century, Rosenberg read its water meters manually. According to Assistant City Manager John Maresh, “Because of the sheer age of the meters, the accuracy was not there. There were a number of stuck meters and a number of misapplications with meter installations.” Many of these misapplications involved multi-resident complexes where turbine meters were installed instead of compound meters, resulting in loss of registration at low flow rates and a corresponding loss of revenue.
It took four meter readers an average of 10 days to read 33 routes for each of two billing cycles per month. The 8,600 meters they read were an eclectic mix of aging units from various manufacturers, making meter reading accuracy an ongoing problem. On top of each cycle’s initial reads were 300 re-reads requiring second and sometimes third walk-bys on site, including missed reads and/or reads that were flagged for either high or low consumption.
From an AMR Pilot to an AMI “Autopilot”
In 2006, as part of a pilot program, the utility installed 400 encoders from Neptune, including ProRead™ encoders paired with R900® RF Meter Interface Units (RF MIUs) and some integrated E-Coder)R900i™ units, which combine a solid-state encoder register and R900 MIU in a single register enclosure. The results from this new ARB® Mobile™ portion of the system – including increased meter reading accuracy in less time – encouraged the City of Rosenberg to “get serious with [its] meter replacement program,” as Finance Director Mindi Snyder put it.
In 2007 and 2008, Maresh and Snyder began looking at other utilities and various meter reading systems. The two had worked previously for other municipalities that performed system-wide changeouts to Neptune’s ARB® Utility Management Systems™. That experience, combined with the success of Rosenberg’s pilot program, made Neptune the obvious choice for the entire system. “Neptune’s product gave us the data we were needing,” Maresh said.
“We were familiar with and satisfied with the product and performance, and satisfied as well with Neptune’s customer service and support.” With the enthusiastic support of the city council, Maresh’s team worked with Neptune Territory Manager Rex Baxter and HD Supply’s Maurice Devries to develop the new project requirements.
Baxter and Devries took a consultative approach and helped Maresh and Snyder evaluate Rosenberg’s needs going forward. These included the ability to monitor leakage at any given customer’s home on a daily basis, and collecting highly accurate meter readings and more advanced consumption data without having to send out meter readers to get it all. Upon seeing what was now available with Neptune’s ARB® FixedBase™ AMI, they were impressed.
