Lavonia Considers Upgrading Water Meters

The Lavonia City  Council is looking at converting all of its water meters to all digital drive by meters.

At a work session Tuesday, the council heard from Lavonia City manager Gary Fesperman who said the city has just over 900 radio read drive by meters of the more than 3,000 customer water meters.  The rest he said are either manual reads or touch read meters.

He said currently, the meter reader reads about 300 meters a day and must get out and look at each meter individually, which is more difficult for the meter reader in rural areas.  He said the radio meters they do have installed must be manually read as well because the city does  not have the accompanying software in the office.

A radio read meter with the proper software, Fesperman said, would allow the meter reader to drive by and pick up the information on a computer.

Fesperman asked that the council begin considering swapping out the old meters in rural neighborhoods for the new digital drive by radio read meters.

“If we could get those changed over in sections, then we could speed our read time to less than a week,” Fesperman said. “It would also bring us into the 21st century like other municipalities around us.  Toccoa is getting ready to replace theirs, Royston just replaced theirs, Cornelia just replaced theirs.”

Fesperman also noted the EPD will soon require all municipalities to have radio read meters. He told the council he is still working on exactly how much it will cost the city to replace existing meters with the new digitial meters.

“We don’t have a firm price because they give breaks on meters in certain increments,’ he said. “You only want to buy the meters and MXU’s you’re going to change out in three months time because meters and MXU’s change. We don’t have a price overall, but the actual meter cost and MXU cost is around $400,000.”

An MXU is a device that is connected to the water meter inside, allowing the meter reader to read the meter by way of radio communication.

That cost would be spread out over a period of years, Fesperman said and could be paid for with a loan/’grant package from the Georgia Environmental Finance Authority.

The council did not vote on the matter, but plans to discuss it further at their next regular meeting in May.