Water & Wastewater Asia May/June 2019

26 | FROM THE GROUND
By Brian Harwood, Eastern Region Manager, Metrology for Mueller Systems
Utilities relying on older “drive-by” Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) are upgrading to next-generation
“smart grid” Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) systems that provide enhanced networked
communications and control.
Manually connecting and
disconnecting water service for
transient residents has been a
long-time administrative hassle for the
Charlotte County Utilities (CCU) in Florida,
but far costlier and more labourintensive
have been the utility’s
year-round water meter inspection
visits collecting on-site water usage
billing data from almost 60,000
Charlotte County residential and
commercial locations.
Until a few years ago, Charlotte County
collected water usage data the old-fashioned
way: CCU employees walking house-tohouse
to collect meter readings. To cut
costs and improve meter-reading efficiency,
CCU launched a multimillion-dollar pilot
programme to replace a quarter of their
15-year-old manual water meters with
Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) meters.
Equipped with short-range radio transmitters,
the AMR meters enable “drive-by” data
collection using vehicles equipped with
specialised radio receivers to collect water
usage data. Charlotte County’s experiment
with AMR meters worked well — for a while.
ADVANCED METERING
INFRASTRUCTURE — AMI
“The radios built into those AMR
meters consistently failed after
a few years in service, but our
meter vendor only offered a
one-year warranty on those
A Mi-Node AMI Meter
units,” said Joan Brown, Charlotte County
Utilities business services manager. “Rather
than replace those defective AMR meters at
a cost of millions of dollars, we decided to
replace all our 58,000 water meters with new
AMI-based water metering technology from
Mueller Systems.”
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)
systems are next-generation “smart grid”
technologies that provide enhanced
networked communications and control
between residential and commercial
metering devices, and utility or municipal
data management systems. Unlike read-only
AMR (automatic meter reading) devices,
AMI technology enables continuously
available two-way communications between
the network and metering devices, enabling
accurate measurement and collection of
detailed usage and billing information,
demand-response capabilities, customer
alerts and notifications, remote serviceconnections
and disconnections, and
more.
Charlotte County Utilities engaged
IoT-based AMI networks provider Mueller
Systems for a pilot project evaluating their
Mi.Net ® AMI data-gathering system designed
specifically for water utilities. Wirelessly
linking meters, distribution sensors, and
Water & Wastewater Asia • May / June 2019