New Water Meters More Accurate, Efficient

Time is money, but so is water.

The Hernando County Utilities Department is hoping save more of all three by stepping up the pace of efforts to replace older water meters.

The tentative plan is to change out nearly 60,000 meters in the next five years, said Utilities Director Joe Stapf. With meters costing about $100 a pop, the price tag could run some $6 million, Stapf said.

It's a big investment, Stapf admitted, but the longterm payoff is worth it, he said.

For one, many of the new meters can be read remotely from the street. The meters send a signal to a remote control, so utilities worker can roll through a neighborhood and jot down readings without getting out of the car.

"Instead of walking and opening (meter) boxes, you don't even have to be on the street," Stapf said. That could save hundreds of manhours each year.

The county has already installed some 3,000 of the so-called "radio read" meters. The City of Brooksville also has started that process.

New meters also will help keep better track of water, Stapf said.

As meters age, they can get less accurate. Minerals clog up the disc in the meter's chamber, allowing more water to pass through than what shows on the meter dial. That means some customers are not paying for all the water they're using, Stapf said.

Replacing inaccurate meters means that the cost to provide water is evenly born by all customers, Stapf said.

There's another advantage.

Roughly 15 percent of the water pumped by the county goes unaccounted for. Some of that is certainly attributable to leaks in the system and will have to be addressed by continuing to repair and upgrade infrastructure, Stapf said.

But officials hope weeding out inaccurate meters will chip away at that figure, he said.

Tony Pastore is the county's water distribution supervisor. Pastore's crews do random testing of meters and also test many of the old meters that are being replaced. He says about 98 percent of the mechanism turn out to be accurate.

But over 60,000 meters, even a few percent can add up.

The more confident officials are in water use data, the better the county can gauge conservation efforts, Stapf said.

"You have to remove as much uncertainty as possible to get a handle on what's going on," he said.

Some utilities have unaccounted for rates of 3 percent. Others, Stapf said, "would give their eyeteeth" to have Hernando's 15 percent.

When asked if he thought Hernando could get down to the three percent, Stapf laughed.

"I don't know if I'd want to say that, but that would be the goal," he said.

The money for the new meters will come out of the utilities department's Rehabilitation and Repair Fund. The department sets aside 15 percent of its revenue for the fund.