Meter Reading

The City of Willamina uses 100% radio read water meters. What took multiple days, staff, paper, pen, and the process of wiping mud off the water meter all while walking around to almost every meter. And if you were lucky it wasn’t raining. Thanks to the radio read meters it can now all be done by one person, using a mobile unit in a vehicle in a short amount of time.

Automatic meter reading or AMR is a automatically collection consumption diagnostic, and status data from water meters technology. The data is then transferred to a central database for billing, troubleshooting and analyzing. This timely information can help both providers and customers better control water consumption and assure better billing accuracies

AMR systems generally requires a radio which is connected to the meter. The radio might be factory installed or in the meter, or most common, a separate component connected to the meter by a wire.

City employees will drive around with a vehicle-mounted unit to collect the meter data, the mounted unit will send out a radio signal and will receive back your meter information directly to the computer in the vehicle. The helps the employee to read meters accurately and efficiently. That information will then be sent off to the Finance Department for billing. This is done once a month.