Here is information about the Program as it was presented for approval by the Board of Directors of OLWS in November 2018. 

• Oak Lodge Water Services District owns and operates around 8,200 water meters.
• Each meter is read six times a year.
• The District standard is to house meters in buried meter vaults located within the public right-of-way, near the properties they serve.
• Most existing meters are analog read. The District’s analog-read water meters are of variety of models, each with its own unique way of being read. Reading meters manually is time consuming and prone to errors that end up requiring more time to troubleshoot.
• Water meters wear out in time as moving parts within them wear down over the course of about 20 years. Replacing worn out water meters is a continuous activity for the District.
• In 2014, the District started standardizing the replacement of worn out meters with a single brand of water meter capable of being read wirelessly.
• Between 2015 and 2018, this effort was taken a step further by District staff replacing entire neighborhoods with Mueller Systems Hot Rod Unit radio-read meters, thus eliminating the need to read those routes manually. About 2,100 of the Districts 8,200 meters were upgraded to radio-read water meters by the end of 2018. This replacement effort by District staff is slow as work needs to be done in between other day-to-day maintenance activities.
• During 2018, the District compared the cost of installing meters using District staff versus speeding up the process by buying meters in bulk and contracting the installation to contractors specializing in rapid water meter installation. The contracting option came out around $200,000 cheaper, even with the cost of interest factored in, and would modernize meter reading within a year, rather than an estimated seven years.
• The Water Meter Replacement Program kicked off at the start of 2019. The newest meters are Mueller Systems Mi.Net Migratable AMI Units. A crew of professional water meters installers has replaced over 1,200 of the remaining 6,100 meters in the first two months of the program.
• In addition, please review the cost comparison and informational materials on the equipment attached below.

Still have questions?

Contact OLWS Civil Engineer: Haakon Ogbeide/haakon@olwsd.org/503-353-4209

• Attached here is the District's cost comparison of meter installations.
• Attached here is the manufacturer’s product description for the meter.
• Attached here is information about the meter interface unit.
• Attached here is the manufacturer's product overview of the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) system.
• Attached here is the manufacturer's product specification sheet on the first set of meters installed (Hot Rod Units).

Supporting Documents: