Officials from the City of Petal are in the process of replacing approximately 3,600 water meters throughout the city in order to upgrade those appliances – some of which are 12 to 15 years old – to make the process of reading them more efficient.
Mayor Tony Ducker said the age of the meters has, in some instances, caused workers from the city’s water department to return to homes to re-read the meters more than once. In several cases, workers have needed to read the meters manually, rather than the usual method of receiving signals from the meters while driving by the property.
“When our trucks ride around, there’s an electronic signal that gets sent to them, and for whatever reason, more and more each month are not ‘pinging’ (getting a signal),” he said. “We’re trying to chip away at it as we can, but it is causing a logistical problem, due to having to re-read them.
“Typically, in the past, we’ve had to re-read 80 to a hundred; now we’re over a thousand that we’re having to re-read. So it’s been tough on Clearwater (Solutions, which runs the Public Works Department), when we could have them doing other things. It’s important that this is something we stay on until we get the problem solved.”
The current meters, which are manufactured by Badger Meters – which has locations throughout the United States, Mexico, Europe, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore – are being replaced with new meters from that same company. In some cases, the transponder of the meter is being replaced; in other cases, it’s the whole unit.
As of late last week, officials had already changed out 561 of the meters, which costs approximately $450 per replacement.
Ducker said the city’s meters are designed to “under-read,” meaning the usage shown on the meter is less than the actual usage.
“I know when people hear there’s a problem with the meter, they think that it’s ‘over-reading,’ but these matters are designed to ‘under-read’ when it’s all said and done,” he said.
Officials expect the entire replacement project to take approximately a year.
“Let’s say I need 3,000 meters at $450 each; you can imagine that real quickly, you’re over a million dollars just purchasing the meters,” Ducker said. “Then you’ve got the logistics of actually getting them into the ground.
“So what I would push for is that we would budget to buy a large number of them, and best case scenario, we would have our own people put them in, just because they’re more familiar with the system. But as they say, everything we do has a dollar amount. And we’re kind of in the situation now where we replace 10 and then you have ten more ‘pinging.’”
In early April, officials from the City of Hattiesburg began implementing the first steps to upgrade approximately 14,000 water meters throughout the city, which is expected to streamline the meter-reading process and eliminate the issues that some customers have seen with longer-than-usual billing cycles. Mayor Toby Barker said many of the dials and endpoints on the current water meters – which transmit water usage to city workers driving by the meters in trucks – are beginning to go out after 15 years of service.
Hattiesburg’s water department staff is currently manually reading approximately 8,600 water meters after 6,400 pieces of equipment malfunctioned last year.
If all goes according to plan, the project will take between eight to 12 months.
The new equipment also will provide customers with real-time access to water meter readings, including daily, weekly and monthly water usage. The technology also will be able to alert customers is a leak is detected in their home or business.
“Peoples’ bills are not going to go up because of this – it’s money that we’ve already got budgeted that’s going to be transferred to debt service,” Barker said. “We’re going to start financing to replace the entire city, especially residential service, to a new cellular device.
“This will have a 20-year warranty, 10 of which is full, and then it pro-rates down after that. Instead of an incremental approach to changing out dials and endpoints for people that have issues with their individual meters, we’re going to (do this) city-wide.”
