A roughly $3.5 million project to upgrade water meters in Columbus is still incomplete.
Columbus Light and Water director Todd Gale said Thursday his employees still need to replace about 250 old meters to complete the project. Gale did not offer a timeframe for accomplishing that.
Gale had intended for the project’s contractor, Utility Meter Services Inc., to finish installing all the new meters by the end of January, but he said his own crews took over finishing the project at the beginning of the year to save money.
“It’s harder to access those meters,” Gale said of those that still need replacing. “They are mostly in concrete and they just need more time and attention. The contractor would have charged us extra hourly rates, so we felt like we’d just do it with our own in-house employees.”
Originally, the project called for UMS to replace 11,126 meters with more accurate, more efficient units, but Gale said the project had grown to about 11,600. Much of that unanticipated increase came from vacant meters not included in the initial project plans. Some vacant meters — which Gale said were connected to inactive irrigation lines or long vacant homes — might be removed from the system altogether.
Gale said UMS began installing the new meters last summer and ceased installation work at the end of December. Since then, he said CL&W crews had installed almost 300 new meters, and the utility has ordered the final 250.
“We’ve got two crews working five days a week to get this project done,” Gale said. “As soon as we get these meters in, we’ll get them installed as quick as we can.”
While the old meters required manual readings, Gale said the new meters would allow “drive-by radio reads,” meaning a reader could drive by the meter and use a remote device to collect its information. The meters will also allow the utility to better assist customers experiencing a water leak, he said, because they will allow CL&W to poll usage hourly if necessary.
Gale said the utility had replaced malfunctioning meters for the last few years, but this was the first system wide water meter replacement in two decades. Some of the replaced meters were 10-20 years old, he said, adding that the new ones should be more accurate simply because they are new.
“With old meters, gears slow down and they wear out,” he said. “Now, we’re more accurately capturing what we are selling.”
CL&W board member Andrew Colom said he hopes to receive a “final update” on the meter project at the board’s March meeting. So far, he said the project had helped the utility “read more meters quicker and more accurately.”
“I’m very satisfied with how smoothly the process has gone,” Colom said. “Testing has been going well, and the meters seem to be working fine.”
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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