AMR, AMI AND METERING RESOURCES

• How To Get Acoustic Leak Detection For The Price Of An AMI Meter

  Whatever number a utility estimates as its non-revenue-water (NRW) loss rate — 20 percent, 30 percent, or more — the willingness to address it is often inversely proportional to the cost of doing so. Now, leak detection options that include acoustic monitoring as a built-in feature of residential water meter replacement are cutting the costs and complexity of identifying NRW losses and recapturing lost revenues.

• Deconstructing The Master Meter Brand

  There is more to a brand beyond its associations with a specific technology. There’s brand history. How did a brand come to be? A brand’s culture drives the company’s evolving strategy and purpose. And then there is the crew behind the brand, which ultimately delivers on the brand promise. Incredibly, for a 40-year-old company, Master Meter’s management team represents nearly 250 years of utility market experience.

• Las Vegas Valley Water District Utilizes Field Tools App And iPhones To Expand Functionality

  The Itron Field Tools mobile app has allowed for our Field Technicians to use their iPhones as a multifunctional device. The Field Tools App also allows us to upgrade with minimal involvement from our IT teams. Testing the application prior to the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) release allowed us to provide feedback making the acceptance level high for our end users. The App is easy to use enabling for quick, simple and minimal training in a virtual meeting environment. The Itron Mobile Radio also helped eliminate previous issues with antenna breakage on the FC300 handheld.

• SWAN Corner: Unlock Data To Improve Water Distribution System Operations

  Water distribution system infrastructures are designed to deliver drinking water to end users, but utilities are continually faced with distinct challenges to fulfill this fundamental objective. For example, these utilities improve customer service by delivering water with high pressure, but on the other hand, water conservation policies push them to minimize water distribution leaks. For this reason, water utilities invest heavily in SCADA and telemetry technologies to support operational decisions. However, unlocking historical operational data and fusing it with other data (such as billing information from AMR/AMI networks) to generate actionable insights has proven difficult.

• Got Water? Regional Water Supply & The Economy

  Got water? Sure, most of us in the United States do. But do we ever stop to smell the roses of odorless fresh potable water? Do we reflect on what reliable water means for the economic life of our community? Texas’s harsh deep freeze earlier this year reminded us Texans of our vulnerability, and after $200B in damages, it gave us a glimpse of how life looks without the core services that we take for granted daily.

• Listening For — And Finding — The Leaks That Can’t Be Seen

  Decades ago, farmers and ranchers around San Marcos, Texas, formed a utility to get water to cattle. Today, Crystal Clear Special Utility District (CCSUD) serves not only rural operations but swaths of a growing metropolis stretching from San Antonio to Austin, providing water to nearly 6,000 connections.

• Making Every Drop Count During Drought And Fire Season

  The year 2020 was truly devastating for wildfires. From California to Australia, the world got a firsthand glimpse into how warmer, drier conditions are enabling harsher periods of drought – resulting in longer fire seasons and greater water scarcity.

• Control Loop Performance Monitoring

  Manufacturing sites have many automatic controllers (typically in the hundreds or even thousands for large facilities). These controllers are designed to run in automatic mode without operator intervention. Most sites don’t have insight into how these controllers are actually performing. 

• Leveraging AMI To Identify & Repair Leaks In North Miami Beach

  Until recently, the City of North Miami Beach relied on traditional walk-up, manual meter reading, and a leak detection service that visited quarterly to survey areas of its distribution system. Surveyors would visit two weeks per quarter, helping city staff systematically go from one end of the 550-mile pipeline system to the other in one-mile sections—it took one and a half years to get through the city’s 25-square-mile service territory. While the city was able to maintain its system and identify leaks, the process was labor intensive and the city understood that automating meter reading and leak detection could be done simultaneously, saving precious time, staff resources, money—and most importantly, water.

• Smart Technology Helps Plug The Water Loss Drain

  ​In a world driven by technology, data is the key to better understanding everything from personal behavior to business performance. For water utilities, collecting data through smart technology is essential for better operations, customer service, and conservation efforts.