Optimized meter changeout: lower losses and much faster payback

A US public utility uses Baseform’s software to drive its customer meter management and meter changeout planning. Working with available data – billing records, customer meter database, water rates and replacement costs – Baseform assesses the metering error and potential changeout payback of every customer meter, and enables the utility to generate optimized changeout plans, driven by payback, apparent losses, and many other possible criteria.

Baseform comes with a complete, fully visual 3D environment to manage meters, consumption, revenue, losses and meter changeout. It ingests and validates billions of individual meter records on the fly, continuously; and it can work with both piecemeal data updates and fully automated data communication, for both AMI and manual reads.

Baseform’s exclusive error curve library takes into account technology, age, diameter, consumption profile, metered volume and more. And the utility user can simply upload and use their own error curves or meter test results.

This utility’s meter changeout strategy involved an initial plan for 1650 meters, about 5% of the total. At a cost of $551k, a plan prioritized by meter age would recover about $125k/year. Using the software, the utility reaches an optimized plan that will not only recover $387k/year for a similar cost, but also achieve a greater reduction in apparent losses.

Among the key results afforded by the software:

1. Revenue and consumption management

• Billed volumes and $ per meter age, profile, tariff, client, group, or globally, for any period and time granularity.
• Detection of abnormal patterns (stopped meters, consumption changes, tariff/consumption mismatch, etc) and commercial risk analysis.

2. Meter changeout planning

• Automated changeout plans, optimized by payback, meter performance, metering error, and more.
• Flexible meter filtering: tariff, technology, age, size, zone, address/geolocation, volume, consumption profile, consumption behavior, likelihood of fraud, top %/ bottom %, stopped meters, data errors, and many others.

3. Apparent losses

• Automated metering error calculation based on exclusive library of error curves, as well as (when available) utility’s own curves or meter test results.

4. AMI/AMR and manual readings integration

• 100% agnostic and future proof; tested with all major technologies.
• Connects to an unlimited number of systems simultaneously.
• Automated syncing and reconciling.

5. SCADA integration and full DMA management

• Continuous, instantaneous water balance, with SCADA integration.
• Event detection, operational response.
• Sector management, water & energy losses management.