Achieving Precision and Efficiency With Cellular AMI: Avon’s Water Utility Transformation

The City of Avon is a longtime customer of Badger Meter, having first deployed a drive-by/walk-by automated meter reading (AMR) system before it transitioned to ORION^® Classic (CE) endpoints. However, Avon also used handheld meter reading solutions that required manual reads for approximately 200 to 300 meters every month.

“Using our old system, we could only read one-third of the city’s meters each month,” explained Anthony Lorenzo, utilities superintendent for the City of Avon. “So, we had to estimate the reads for the other two-thirds of the city. That meant every account was only read accurately once a quarter. We lost time and money, and our customers were upset. We needed to make a change.”

Transforming the System

In February 2016, the City of Avon’s water utility team began putting together a request for proposal (RFP) for a fixed network meter reading solution. At this time, the BEACON^® Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, which combines BEACON with ORION Cellular endpoints, was mainstreaming in the market. As the industry’s first endpoint to use existing cellular networks, ORION Cellular endpoints eliminate the need for utilities to build or maintain their own gateway infrastructure. Seeing the potential of this market-disrupting technology, the City of Avon switched gears and issued an updated RFP for a hybrid meter reading solution, one that included both traditional fixed network and cellular advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) systems for customer water usage.

After a brief search, the City of Avon’s utility team selected a BlueEdge™ solution from Badger Meter: BEACON with ORION Cellular endpoints and E-Series^® Ultrasonic meters. BEACON is a cloud-based software analytics platform that allows Avon to utilize both the new ORION Cellular endpoints as well as traditional fixed network technologies.

“With BEACON SaaS, we were able to move to 24-hour meter reads across our entire system. We are now monitoring more precisely, and more importantly, billing our customers more consistently, using actual meter reads rather than estimates,” said Natalie Cifranic, billing clerk for the City of Avon.

Avon’s old meter reading solution required utility technicians to spend more than 160 hours (or two weeks) every month monitoring the water meter reading system, manually reading meters and acting on the data. By implementing BEACON, Avon cut that time down nearly 88% to about 20 hours (or one day) per month.

“Our new solution, paired with our new E-Series meters, has allowed us to be more efficient with our time and effectively respond to leaks or issues for our customers,” said Lorenzo. “We know that the data coming in is reliable and accurate.”

Finding the Right Meter

Before the City of Avon installed E-Series Ultrasonic meters throughout its system, the utility faced a series of challenges in identifying meter locations. The previous meters had been operating for many years, sometimes well beyond their lifespan. Specific meter locations were known by individual utility technicians, rather than stored in a central database that the accounting department could access for billing purposes.

“The legacy data system was not always accurate, nor did it contain important information on the meters and their locations,” said Lorenzo. 

After selecting Badger Meter, Avon spent almost two years overhauling and installing new billing software and meters to replace the many varieties of meters previously in the ground. Utility staff was also able to find and map the locations for the new E-Series Ultrasonic meters and incorporated them into a new geographic information system (GIS), so that meter readers could easily locate meters, even during the snowy winter months in Ohio. Alongside BEACON, the E-Series Ultrasonic meters significantly improved the water utility’s meter reading accuracy. Prior to implementing these meters, Avon found that some of its water meters were reading flows at 60 to 80% accuracy. With the E-Series meters, accuracy improved to nearly 100%, making Avon’s one of the most successful hybrid systems in the nation.

Working With the Customer

In addition to improving its data accuracy and reliability, as well as meter reading efficiency, the City of Avon’s utility team has worked diligently to encourage customers to be accountable for their water usage. With BEACON, water utilities can offer their customers access to EyeOnWater^®, a smartphone app and web portal that provides timely and accurate data about their water usage. This means that while the City of Avon water utility team monitors for leaks throughout its system, its water customers can also monitor for unexplained increases in their usage and notify the utility.

“We currently have about 1,500 people signed up for EyeOnWater, and they like the system a lot. Our water customers are actively engaging with their consumption patterns and notifying us about concerns,” said Cifranic. “The EyeOnWater application has also helped our customer service team reduce time spent handling billing disputes. Thanks to EyeonWater, what used to take upwards of 2-3 hours from the office to the field and back to get a resolution now only takes a 5–10-minute phone call with a customer—without having to roll a truck at all. We have accurate and reliable data at our fingertips, so we simply show the customer the data,” Cifranic added.

Building a Successful System

“This solution has been transformative for us. We now know that we will receive timely and accurate data every day. It has also helped us improve accountability with our customers and our rate payers, and with the scale of Avon’s growth, this will be especially critical for our future,” said Lorenzo. “Working with the Badger Meter team has been highly successful, and we know we can trust this technology to be effective for years to come.”