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The City of Ottawa is set to spend $25 million to connect 190,000 water meters — which are found in every home and business on the municipal supply — to the Internet.
The initiative, which is expected to get under way this spring, will allow the city to constantly monitor and precisely measure the water use of each home on the municipal supply. It will also open the door for time-of-use pricing on water consumption. Time-of-use pricing would, for example, allow the city to alter rates at peak usage times or during a water shortage. The meters would also allow the city to detect who is over-watering the lawn during a drought, for example. It could potentially track each toilet flush or turning of the tap.
“At this point that is not in our plan, that is not to say it will never happen. This technology will allow us to migrate to that should we choose to go that route,” said Michael Burt, manager of customer services and operational support in the city’s environmental services department.
The city does not see the technology as being any more invasive than what it is currently using.
“Whether we know how much water they use on a daily basis or on a monthly basis really isn’t an impact on privacy, I don’t believe,” said Burt.
The new program would make every water meter in the city “smart.”
Here’s how: The existing meter would be replaced by a small black box which can monitor water use and, by using radio frequency technology, beam the water usage of a home back to the city in real time. Doing so will allow the city to cut its water meter reading staff from 11 to around three. Burt said displaced meter readers will be transferred to jobs in other city departments.
Today the city collects information about water use every two months. Doing so requires a meter reader to visit a home and insert a device into a small black touchpad, usually located outside a garage door, to collect information about that home’s water use.
The problem, according to the city, is that many current readers are broken leading to bills based on estimated water usage as opposed to the volume actually consumed.
According to Alta Vista Councillor Peter Hume, the new initiative allows the city to replace the antiquated touch pad technology being used, which is now more than 20 years old.
“It’s so obsolete now that we are getting to the point where we have to do something,” said Hume. “The technology now is so old that we can’t find replacement parts. We could continue to replace it with a standard technology or you could go to an automated meter.”
Except in a few cases, where there is a problem with the connection to the water meter itself, residents won’t even notice that their reader has been switched for a smart one. City crews will simply replace them with a new one.
“One day they will go to work with a black thing outside of the house and they will come back and find a slightly different black thing in the same location,” said Dixon Weir, Ottawa’s director of utility services.
Hume said maintaining the existing technology will cost the city $16 million over the next four years. Moving forward with the upgrade will cost more then simply maintaining what is already in place, but it will be less costly to administer in future.
According to Hume, the city’s environmental services department will save around $1 million a year collecting meter readings and issuing water bills once the new technology is installed.
The new meters will also help the city determine which neighbourhoods are using the most, allowing for better city planning in the future. It will also allow city water officials to monitor leaks in water lines or blocked water mains faster, since they know exactly how much water is being used in a neighbourhood at any given time. For example, if water is flowing to a neighbourhood constantly, but none of the meters are reporting use then maintenance crews can assume there is a broken water main somewhere in the area and set out to fix it.
The initiative was originally approved by council in 2006 and has since been in the tendering process. It was to roll out in 2007, in tandem with Ottawa Hydro’s rollout of smart electricity meters. However, when there was no apparent cost savings associated with rolling the smart water meters out alongside their electrical counterparts the city decided to postpone the water meter upgrades. It was revisited last year.
The city has now completed all of the preliminaries of tendering and a contract will be awarded to a company in the coming weeks. The city hopes to install the new technology in homes sometime in the spring. A spokesman said the city hopes to have all homes and businesses in Ottawa switched over to the new technology by 2012.
The city has set aside $25 million from the 2006 budget to pay for the initiative.
The change over comes at a time when the city of Ottawa is using less water then it has in decades. A public information campaign, increases to the cost of water and a cool, wet summer saw water use decline by 6.5 per cent last year. The drop created a revenue shortfall of $7 million for the year.
The initiative has drawn the immediate ire of the Ottawa Taxpayer Advocacy Group who call the smart meters a tax grab on Ottawa residents.
“Only the City of Ottawa will try to solve a spending problem by spending more money to buy smart meters that residents do not need. A water revenue shortfall is a good thing and all the City needs to do is reduce costs to match the drop in revenue,” said the group in an e-mailed statement. “Any desires to change water consumption patterns should be solved by education rather than legislation.”