City hears water meter change proposal

Public Works Director Newt Benson gave the Batesville Mayor and Board of Aldermen a presentation recently about the technological advancements in the laborious process of reading water meters each month.

Benson said the presentation was just a preliminary bit of information to give board members notice of better equipment and services available for both municipalities and customers.

Most of the city’s approximate 3,600 meters are read by radio frequency – three trucks are driven around the city to collect the data and then operators take the gathered data to City Hall for downloading and eventual billing.

Using new cellular read meters, clerks at City Hall would have almost real-time access to water meter readings, eliminating the process of riding the streets to get the information and then transferring it to a billing system.

Also, Benson said, customers who have cellular meters would have a phone app that would allow for monitoring of water usage and updates up to 15 times a day if requested.

“A customer could actually be on vacation and get an alert that water usage at their home was rising,” he said. “If they know that nobody is at the residence then they could contact the city to shut off their water at the meter because they would know something was leaking.”

“Eventually everybody will have this system and it’s something that we need to begin thinking about how we are going to afford to make these changes,” Benson said. He estimated that the total cost for converting the city to cellular read meters would be about $2 million.

“Another option would be for the city to purchase ten of these at a time and start replacing the old radio read ones as they go out,” he said. “It would cost more to buy them that way but would be a way for the city to begin the process.”

Switching to a cellular system would not involve replacing the whole meter, just the top attachment that is used for the current data gathering process. Each of the city’s residential and business meters could be changed in a few minutes each, and would not involve any digging or unit replacement.

Aldermen were interested in the upgrade, indicating they will revisit the suggestion in later meetings.

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