Meter Reading With 5-Minute Interval, Fraction-Of-A-Gallon Resolution Data Logging

What if your water meters contained a cellphone modem instead of an RF chip? And what if Verizon Wireless provided the wireless infrastructure for your meter reading operation? These are some of the questions Transparent Technologies Inc. (T2) grappled with in the early days of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) development.

“A few years back, AMI meant funding propagation studies and then buying the infrastructure, installing and testing it before beginning to read some meters after a lot of effort and expense,” explains Mike Giarratano, Sales Manager with Metron Farnier and Transparent Technologies (T2) in this Water Online Radio interview. “We had the idea that the best wireless infrastructure for almost every utility across the country is already in place and that’s the Verizon Wireless infrastructure.”

T2 and Verizon worked together to replace the RF chip in T2’s drive-by Innov8 Register with a cellphone modem. The modem-enabled Innov8 VN makes a data connection or phone call daily and dumps two-hundred and eighty-eight data points, collected at five-minute interval readings into the utility's private Internet cloud, hosted by Microsoft.

“You put it on the meter today and you are reading it tomorrow without any investment or deployment of infrastructure,” Giarratano states. “You don't have any of those costs or headaches that go along with infrastructure.”

To learn about the advantages of five-minute interval data logging, click on the player below: