When all 1,780 of Yellow Springs’ residential water meters get upgraded before the year’s end, Village Meter Reader Rose Pelzl won’t have to wade through dense foliage to do her work — at least as often. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Yellow Springs water, electric meters to go remote
- Published: August 12, 2024
Over the next several months, crews will be at work throughout the village replacing each and every one of the 1,700-some residential water and electric meters.
Soon, Yellow Springs residents will have meters that can be read remotely and quickly — each producing hour-by-hour usage data. The goal of this initiative? To help local utility customers better monitor usage, and as a result, save money and resources.
Already, this villagewide replacement effort is underway. Village meter reader Rose Pelzl has, in the last year-and-a-half, been following through with a pilot program that has already replaced 76 residential meters with meters that can be read remotely.
That pilot program, Pelzl told the News last month, has already yielded dividends for some residents.
“A couple weeks ago, our system gave out an intermittent flag for this one,” Pelzl said, crouching over a water meter buried in the front yard of a Paxson Drive home. “It remotely showed us that there was a gallon of water being used every hour for the last two days — which is not normal.”
“It was a leak,” she said.
Pelzl’s hunch proved right — she walked around the side of the home and found water leaking from where a spigot met a garden hose. She knocked on the door and told the resident who sighed, and said her husband sometimes forgets to turn off the hose.
That’s essentially how these new remote-read water meters will work. They will routinely transmit radio data to Pelzl’s first-floor office in the Bryan Center, where she monitors the water usage of every utility customer in the village. If, for a particular home, usage rates appear to spike in a patterned way — water running at unusual times, throughout the night and day, or at suspicious volumes — Pelzl will contact the homeowner to get to the bottom of the situation.
“Toilets are the main culprit — they leak all the time and you won’t always hear it,” Pelzl said.
This villagewide replacement effort has been a long time coming, Pelzl noted. According to her, most of Yellow Springs’ water meters are around 30 years old — many with deteriorating mechanics that don’t clearly indicate leaks or are challenging for her and her co-meter reader, Travis Hotaling, to read.
Once all 1,780 residential water meters in Yellow Springs are replaced in the coming months, Meter Reader Rose Pelzl’s work will look a little more like this: monitoring data, patterns and rates of water consumption from her office in the John Bryan Center. The new remotely-read meters will allow Pelzl to catch leaks much earlier than when she and her co-reader Travis Hotaling read meters by hand. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Council offered their support for the replacement project at the group’s most recent meeting on Monday, July 15, when they unanimously approved a resolution to authorize Village Manager Johnnie Burns to purchase 1,780 remotely-read water meters from Cincinnati-based Neptune Equipment Company — the manufacturer of the meters, who will be doing all of the installation work. While that many meters cost over $780,000, the Village recently received a grant from the Ohio Public Works Commission to cover around 84% of that cost.
“This is a really good thing for the village,” Pelzl said. “We’re far behind most other communities in the area with updating our meters. And property owners will really benefit because we’ll be able to more quickly notify them of high usage.”
The new, remotely-read water meters, were made by Cincinnati-based Neptune Equipment Company. Representatives from Neptune will soon make contact with every Yellow Springs property owner with a water meter to set a time for replacement. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Pelzl said that Neptune’s installation work is set to begin imminently. In the coming weeks, representatives from the company will be going door to door and sending out letters to determine the best time to temporarily turn off residents’ water while their meters are replaced.
Neptune workers will schedule their work in two-hour blocks, Pelzl said: 9–11 a.m., 11 a.m.–1 p.m., 2–4 p.m. and 4–6 p.m., Monday through Thursday. Weekend appointments will be made once a month.
“I very much want people to be aware of this and not be surprised when they get notified that someone’s coming out to change their meter,” Pelzl said. “This isn’t a scam.”
She added that she believes Neptune will finish replacing all the meters before the year’s end — perhaps a little later than when the new ones would have been most useful: during these hot summer days.
“Bills are always the highest in the summer — it’s when kids are home and kids use a lot of water,” Pelzl said with a smile. “They bathe instead of taking showers, you’re doing more dishes and running the toilets more often.”
According to the EPA, the average adult uses between 2,000 and 4,000 gallons of water a month, but Pelzl said for the average Yellow Springer, it’s probably closer to 1,200.
“Most homes are pretty consistent month-to-month,” she said. “And [Travis and] I typically know how many people live in each home, and so we know what to look for and what to expect.”
So while the water meters get their much-needed upgrade and Pelzl and Hotaling’s work is sure to change — far less walking and meter reading by hand — their community-minded approach to their work will remain.
“I believe in municipal-owned utilities,” Pelzl said. “I prefer working for my community rather than a corporation. I’m not enriching stockholders. If I’m enriching something, I’m enriching my community.”
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