Smart water metering investment

Oppegård Municipality is one of five neighboring municipalities in a Norwegian alliance who joined together to invest in about 14,000 intelligent water meters and a remote reading system – the biggest order yet within water metering in Norway. 

 
The collaboration became a reality because of their shared need to update and replace their traditional mechanical water meters with new intelligent water meters.
 
An innovative smart metering solution from Kamstrup is expected to provide great benefits to the municipalities as well as to their customers today and in the future.

A wealth of benefits
According to Hossein Karganrood, advisor at Oppegård Municipality, they consider the most important benefits of the new metering solution to be the automated and much more efficient meter reading, improved insight into consumption and the notification of leaks and bursts. 
 
The innovative smart metering technology will give them the data and knowledge they need to effectively optimise their network and improve the customer service they provide:
 
“We wanted to upgrade our water meters to be able to collect readings remotely for more accurate data and better service to our customers”.

Today, customers manually read their own water consumption once a year via forms sent out by the municipality but a number of them never respond.
 
The follow-up process to collect the missing data involves a lot of time and administration not to mention inconvenience and trouble with customers. In some cases, the municipality has no choice but to bill customers based on their estimated consumption.

This always creates problems with customers who get unexpectedly large bills – especially in cases with an undetected internal leakage at the property. As a result, these cases can be a very time-consuming element.

The new intelligent water meters, Kamstrup’s MULTICAL® 21, will be read automatically with the remote reading system, READy.

This will not only enable efficient meter reading but also provide the data required to ensure accurate billing of customers. 
 
Combined with the quality and compact size of the MULTICAL® 21 electronic water meter, its pinpoint accuracy throughout the meter lifetime was therefore a key factor for the municipalities in choosing Kamstrup as their solutions provider.

Better service to customers
The transition from the current, mechanical meters to intelligent meters will also benefit the municipality’s customers, who will be spared the trouble of reading their own meters and can be sure that they are billed based on their exact water consumption.
 
In addition, once the new meters are installed, Oppegård Municipality will be able to quickly notify specific customers in the event of leaks and bursts. This will not only save the customers water but also the potentially enormous costs related to water damages.

“We expect good results in terms of saving time, money and reducing leakage in our pipelines.”

However, due to the scale of the project and the size of the investment, it was critical for the joining municipalities that they made the right choice for both the short term and the long term. Hossein Karganrood elaborates:

“The right choice for us is a metering solution that meets the needs we have today, but one that will also answer to the expectation of future technology. It has to be future proof. We believe that Kamstrup delivers on this expectation with their intelligent water meters.”