City of Allen to begin transition to smart water meters

The city of Allen announced that the installation of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), commonly known as smart water meters, is slated to begin this October. The announcement comes after the Allen City Council approved the purchase of additional smart water meters in its July 12 meeting.

Smart water meters offer many benefits over the current touch read meters, including more frequent meter readings, conserved transmitter battery life, equal billing intervals, a customer portal with detailed water use insights, and leak notifications from the portal, according to the city of Allen website.

“[We currently] have city of Allen employees who go around each month, and they have a wand, so to speak, that they touch to the top of your meter. That collects the data of how much water you've used,” William Nahas said, who is the AMI project manager. “But again, that is every month that we are reading this. [Smart water meters are] going to be giving you hourly data.”

Smart water meters will also allow for constant water bill intervals, Nahas said.

“Right now, just based on our utility billing cycles, your bills can fall between 28 to 35 days,” Nahas said. “This is going to allow us to put it on an exact 30 day schedule.”

In addition to the smart water meters, a customer dashboard will provide water use data to Allen residents, including leak alerts and hour-by-hour consumption rates.

“They're going to be able to see their consumption, in almost real time, for the most part. It's going to eliminate surprises,” Nahas said. “So you can say, ‘Oh, this month, I've already used 10,000 gallons. Let's get ready, it might be a higher bill.’ It's just going to help you make simple choices to hopefully conserve water and monitor your water use.”

The process of changing the water meter will be unintrusive, Nahas said.

“In your yard, in your household, there's no change,” Nahas said. “It's just going to be the meter change, and that takes roughly 15 to 30 minutes. It's not a big disruption whatsoever.”

Allen personnel will also benefit from not having to manually read water meters.

“We won't have staff driving around and touching meters every month anymore,” Nahas said. “This will all be electronic.”

As triple-digit temperatures have left Texas scorched, smart water meters will allow both the city and its residents to be mindful of their water use.

“AMI is going to allow us to have more efficient processes throughout the city, which is going to lead to a reduced city service cost over time,” Nahas said. “As soon as temperatures go up, water use tends to go up as well. So making people aware of what's going on out there (...) is one of the best ways to be getting people to be better stewards of their water use.”

Customers will receive a letter and a door hanger about upcoming work five to six weeks before their water meter is replaced.

Contractors will install approximately 100 water meters a day starting this October with completion anticipated by December 2023.

More information can be found here: bit.ly/3IQrVxi