Small City Spends $18 Million On AMI System. Did It Pay Off?

A few years ago, a town in North Carolina joined forces with SAS Institute and Aquastar technology to offer customers more data on their water consumption.

The budget for the project was nearly $18 million. Did the major investment actually help? New stats released by the town suggest that it did.

"Prior to Aquastar, the Town of Cary was manually reading over 57,000 meters per month with deployment trucks and water personnel. Since readings are now taken through wireless technology, Aquastar has reduced Cary’s fuel consumption by over 7,000 gallons a year and improved the town’s carbon footprint by 71,000 miles of truck travel," according to the Cary Citizen.

Cary, NC, installed Aquastar, an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system, to "take water readings remotely every hour and relay them to the town government’s database via a battery-operated radio transmitter. The big switch, which started with a proposal in 2009, eventually led to the installation of 60,000 new meters in Cary and Morrisville," the report said.

Customers do not always see the benefits of receiving more data. Lori Bush, a local town council representative, took a turn pitching the data influx to residents in her blog.

"The Aquastar web portal will show you a rolling 13 months of data – giving you the ability to compare your most recent month with the same month of the last year. You can drill down into a month, to see the weeks, days, and finally, hourly usage. You can also look at a particular data range, as well. (All of this data can be downloaded for the real geeks to use in a spreadsheet, if you are so inclined)," she wrote.

The town provides customers with instructions on how to use Aquastar on its website.

For more information on AMI systems, check out Water Online's AMR, AMI, and Metering Solution Center.