Houston's water meters continue to malfunction
The ongoing saga of the city's unreliable water meters continues as KHOU-11 reported last week:
“When you open up the bill and it’s nearly $3,000, it’s quite a shock,” Dwight Cook said.
Cook’s January bill was, in fact, $3,000. The month before it was $34.
Naturally, he called the city. They said he had been underpaying since 2005, and this was his backpayment.
“They essentially told me they had not taken a meter reading in the past two and a half years,” Cook said.
The city had been averaging his bills.
[snip]
In fact, 11 News learned this is all part of a much bigger problem – public works tells us it has impacted nearly one in every four water meters.
In 1999, the city began adding radio encoders to all meters so they could be read remotely and quickly. They should last eight years, but starting failing after just two years.
The city contracted Itron, the vendor, which replaced 20-25,000 of the encoders at no charge.
And since so many transmitter are failing so early, the city had to call back its old meter readers.
The story goes on to note that many of the city's water meters need to be replaced but that will take another 18 months. Of course, since that's a government estimate, we know it's probably wildly optimistic, just like the entire automated water meter system has turned out to be.
Here's an excerpt of Ubu Roi's fine post from January where he took an in-depth look at how bad the malfunctioning water meter problem really is:
It doesn't help that the transmitters' failure rate is often "enhanced" accidentally or otherwise, by severed wires, metal objects on top of the meter box, or being run over by vehicles. Of course, this isn't a problem for the city, as it authorizes itself to estimate the meter readings indefinitely--without telling the customer.
As they say, read the whole thing, if you haven't already.
(Ubu notes: I've added more information below the fold, for those who want to dig a bit deeper, but I warn you, there's math involved!)
UBU ROI ADDS: Let's just say that my unique position keeps me from saying so much more that I could; I have been trying to obtain much more information on this issue, but it's difficult for me to do so without compromising my sources. I'll be returning to writing actual articles and stuff in the upcoming week, but the information I have is that the contractor trying to replace those meters isn't living up to expectation. This project was ill-concieved and should never have been attempted; the city just needs to give it up, staff the water department properly, and stop trying to cram down everyone's throats these flawed automation projects hawked by profiteering so-called "private sector" companies.
Any competent engineer would have laughed at the idea of reliable electronic devices being placed in holes in the ground. Sure, you could do a small-scale project and nurse the devices along, but you're talking about over 400,000 of the things, and trying to get them to work for ten years. The base concept isn't bad, but the scale on which it was being attempted was just ludicrous. Take 400,000 meters times 365 x 10, that's 1,460,000,000 meter-days for problems to occur over the expected replacement cycle of all these meters in the city. Repair is not an option; the meter must be replaced (or at least a portion of it attached to the transmitter; I'm not clear on that. The source article for my prior post called it an Encoder Receiver Transmitter.)
Or put another way, if there is a .1% chance for a meter to develop a problem in any given month, that's 400 meters a month. How much time and money does it take to replace these parts? I'll be honest: I don't know. But a half-hour seems to be reasonable. That would mean, not counting travel time to and from each job, that a repairman could fix sixteen a day. There are about 20 working days in each month, so it should take one full-time guy and one part-timer to repair these. Can the city not scrape up one person to do the job? Is Public Works that strapped for people? (I know my area is.) Considering the problems the police department is facing, this seems quite probable, but the fact that the city had to hire a contractor to bring in over a dozen people means that either I'm being too optimistic in my assumptions, or the problem has been allowed to snowball to gargantuan proportions.
Well, they did mention replacing a quarter of the meters in the city... but let me say something else: not only do meters sit in holes in the ground -- often those holes are in the middle of poorly maintained parking lots, or beside driveways, or directly by curbs, or next to shrubbery/trees with growing roots. They're run over by lawnmowers, kids on bicycles, cars, trucks, 18-wheelers, you name it. A .1% per month rate is almost certainly optimistic.
Now if I were to file a TPIA with Public Works, I would ask three simple questions:
1. How many non-electronic meters does the city have remaining?
2. How many electronic meters has the city installed since beginning the program?
3. How many electronic meters had to be estimated last month?
The first two will tell us how many times they've had to replace defective (uh, sorry, "failing") meters over and over, and the second will tell us how big the problem really is. There's also some kind of adjustment they call a "city leak" where the city admits fault for a mis-billing, but apparently it's not often used for this--the customer has to take the brunt of the city's errors on this one. I'm trying to get more details.
(Apologies to anyone who's tried to reach me the last few days, but I'm out of town due to an emergency that fell on top of the computer issues, so my time and email access has been spotty.)
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 02/25/07 03:33 PM | Houston Miscellany | Technorati | Sphere | Comments (2)
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