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Goodbye Meter
Reader
By Bruce Mushial
Electric and water utilities
are benefiting from new technology in many ways. If you're
one of these utilities one of the areas of overhead you'd
love to be without is the expense of finding out how much
of your product your customers have used during a billing
period. For decades electric, water, and gas utilities have
delegated this process to the meter reader. This lucky person
got to walk from neighborhood to neighborhood fighting off
dogs and stomping on your favorite flowers gathering the readings
from your utility meters. People who are meter readers require
benefits, vacation, overtime, and workman's compensation.
They call in sick which throws of the collection of data that
you need to generate data, they get hurt on the job, and can
get you sued if they say the wrong things or peek in the wrong
places. Now utilities are benefiting from a new technology:
the wireless data transmitter. A logical outgrowth of wireless
phones and the technology that makes them work, most of these
new units attach to your existing meter with just a couple
of screws and transmits how much product you used during the
billing period. Your low power transmitter sends the information
to a neighborhood receiver or mobile radio truck, which then
uses cellular technology to send the data to the utilities
billing center. This all may seem novel but a light bulb should
go on in an investor's head when they read about this shift
in technology. There are tens of millions of American households
that still need to have this technology installed. Privately
held and publicly traded companies providing this technology
includes NexusData, DCSI, Hexagram, Hunt Technologies and
Innovatec. The oldest companies in the field are American
Meter, Itron, and Schlumberger. Watch out, your house might
be the next to get this innovative technology, or another
new technology.
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