AMI Under The Microscope: Beaverton Water Division Answers Questions About Its AMI Transition

Beaverton Water Division’s ongoing transition to Kamstrup advanced metering infrastructure represents a significant step toward modernizing its water system and addressing longstanding challenges tied to aging infrastructure, limited leak detection capabilities, and manual meter reading processes. During a recent Water Online webinar, utility and Kamstrup representatives fielded extensive questions about deployment progress, operational benefits, and practical considerations. The discussion detailed how the compact size of Kamstrup meters allowed the city to avoid replacing thousands of existing meter boxes—an avoidance that saved millions of dollars and expanded the project’s coverage from 70% to 100% within the same budget. Early results from the acoustic leak detection feature have been highly accurate, identifying both service-line failures and at least one major main break, all without generating false positives. The Q&A also covered customer pushback, billing integration workflows, communications protocols, collector performance, change management challenges, and coordination with large industrial customers. Together, these insights show how Beaverton is using AMI and ALD to reduce non-revenue water, strengthen service reliability, and streamline field operations as full deployment continues.