The Background:
One of Israel's largest cities, Petach-Tikva (door of hope), is located in the middle of the country near Tel-Aviv, with 75,000 water meter locations citywide. The municipality had managed the water system (reading and billing) for this fast growing population center for over 50 years.
A serious, long term problem however had been ‘Water Loss’ in the p ublic water system. This not only resulted in a significant decline in revenue for the municipality, but also a tragic waste of one of Israel’s most limited natural resources - water.
The Problem:
One of the overriding factors responsible for the water loss problem included the highly labor-intensive method used by the city for reading water meters. ‘Readings’ were commonly conducted by sending out scores of ‘readers’ to manually visit each meter location on a bi-monthly basis.
This method of meter reading was clearly inadequate for the following reasons:
- In point of fact, many meters were not actually ‘read’ and water bills were merely an estimate.
- ‘Readers’ in the field made many typographical errors, logging-in wrong numbers.
- Office workers misread reader’s logs or keyed-in wrong data into the system.
- Bills sent to the customer were not accurate, causing revenue loss and time consuming billing adjustments.
- There was no information available about meter performance between readings.
- Actual payment was made only 60 days after the reading.
Conclusion: Readings were expensive to conduct and the revenue too small to support the system.
The Solution:
In 2004 the municipal government privatized the public water system, and management was transferred to the Meitav Water Utility.
One of the first changes Meitav instigated was to revamp the system from ‘Manual’ to ‘Remote’ meter reading. Following a competitive bid tender, Arad Metering Technologies Ltd. was awarded the contract. Visit our company profile at: http://www.aradtec.com/profile.asp
The first step was to create a pilot program replacing 2000 existing meters with Arad Tec’s exclusive ‘Dialog 3G’ Meters. The pilot ran for 3 reading periods (6 months), and the results went far beyond expectations. Readings in the pilot area resulted in a billing increase of 20%.
Contributing factors towards the increase were as follows:
- ‘Dialog 3G’ Meters gave far more accurate readings.
- Any misuse of meters or water flow such as tampering, theft, or sabotage was immediately detected by the system.
- Billing was totally accurate, eliminating disputes and adjustments.
- Big labor savings for the Utility, with no more citywide manual meter readers.
New Arad-Tec Water System Structure:
The Outcome:
After the successful completion of the pilot program, the Meitav Water Utility began converting all existing meters, including those of varying calibrations into the new Dialog 3G meters.
After the conversion, the Utility had instant website access (tracking and monitoring) of the entire city’s water meter infrastructure, via Arad Tec’s software system. Today over 70,000 new meters have been incorporated into the new system. The latest reports reveal that water loss has dropped dramatically from 12% to 2%.
The Utility enjoys big savings in labor compared with the labor-intensive methods used by the municipality, and billing is far more accurate. It’s a win-win situation for both the Utility and consumers alike.
Consumers can easily check their personal water consumption and get up to date billing information at any time, simply using a home computer with internet access. Statistical data is presented in a rich graphical format with easy to read graphs, charts and reports.
Readings for other utilities such as electricity meters can also be done in the same way, using the Arad-Tec system network.
|
