LAWTON – Workers from Lawton’s Meter Services Division continue installing new “smart” meters that last longer than older models, provide accurate readings to a minuscule level, and help detect line leaks quicker.
City crews have been replacing water meters for about 18 months and will continue doing so for another 12 to 15 months, Public Utilities Director Rusty Whisenhunt told Southwest Ledger. “We’re installing about 700 new meters each month,” he said.
The majority of the residential meters are ¾ inch or 1-inch. Approximately 95% of all meters in Lawton “are this size,” he said.
The City of Lawton has 32,500 utility accounts but “some of those are not active.” Approximately 28,000 accounts are active, Whisenhunt said.
“We have replaced a little over 12,000 water meters” with new Sensus iPERL meters, “and we have another 10,000 or so to go,” he said. The city has an inventory of “about 20,000 meters,” he informed the City Council recently.
According to the manufacturer, the iPERL system is “an innovative residential water management system with unparalleled low-flow accuracy, high-flow durability, and minimal wear and maintenance needs.”
Unlike antiquated metal meters, an iPERL unit is “a solid state device designed with no moving parts to decrease the wear.” The device’s body is “comprised of a composite material, ensuring that it is 100% lead-free and stable across a wide range of temperatures.”
The new meters are manufactured of a composite hard plastic and won’t corrode, Whisenhunt said. They can be broken by impact, of course, “but they’re more durable than the ones they’re replacing, which have a plastic body and slowed down with age, so customers were ‘underbilled,” he said.
An iPERL meter reads by water movement and has sensors that pick up the flow of the water. The devices are accurate to 5 one-hundredths of a gallon per minute, Whisenhunt said.
According to the manufacturer, the units can register flow as low as 0.03 gallon per minute and operates from 11 hundredths of a gallon per minute up to 55 gpm, with a margin of error plus/minus 3%.
The new units are AMR (automated meter reading) meters that “provide continuous reads” via the city’s radio network. “We download the data from those meters every morning and transfer the data to the Revenue Services Division,” which uses the information for billing customer accounts.
The new devices replace meters that were installed “in the 2008-09 time frame,” Whisenhunt said. Those units were AMR meters, too, and had a lifespan of approximately 15 years, “but these new ones have a guaranteed lifespan of 20 years.”
The sophisticated new meters range in price from about $450 to $750 apiece, Whisenhunt said.
Since installation by a contractor would cost about the same amount, the City of Lawton does the work “with our in-house personnel.” Whenever a contractor is replacing a water line in a Lawton neighborhood, “They remove the old meters and install the new ones,” Whisenhunt added.
Oklahoma City and Norman are installing the same type of water meters as Lawton, “but they’re using contractors,” he said.