May 22, 2002 -- Datamatic recently announced an agreement with the City of Henderson, Nevada to install FIREFLY Automatic Meter Reading technology throughout its 62,500-meter service territory.
Henderson's need for reliable automation was underscored by it being named the fastest growing large city in America by the US Census Bureau.
Installation of the system, which will incorporate a mixture of FIREFLY optic and wired-end Meter Interface Units, began April 1st and is scheduled to be completed within 12 months. The City will use the ROADRUNNER™ Mobile vehicle-based receiver as its main data collection platform supplemented by ROADRUNNER handheld computers for load profile extractions and system maintenance.
Henderson's AMR Committee performed an exhaustive evaluation of radio frequency AMR systems prior to deciding on FIREFLY.
"Like many of our utility customers who have implemented AMR projects over the past several years, Henderson developed a strong business case by keying on the short and long-term benefits of the FIREFLY's meter independence and the new realms of value added by its integrated load profiling," said Scott Durham, Datamatic Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "We continue to see strong growth as more utilities do their homework and come to the same conclusion Henderson did; that the FIREFLY technology makes the greatest business sense of any radio frequency AMR solution recently."
In addition to offering the widest meter compatibility of any available AMR solution, FIREFLY Meter Interface Units also store consumption data at user-definable intervals.
Most water utilities set this interval to one hour. At this setting, FIREFLY MIU's hold hourly consumption patterns for the previous 74.6 days. ProfilePLUS data is easily extracted when needed to address customer consumption disputes, identify leaks and monitor/enforce water conservation.
Data of this kind was previously unavailable without costly and complicated flow monitors. FIREFLY users have access to this data at every meter, all the time.
Datamatic has been a leading technology provider to the utility industry since 1977.
