Agenda - Council - 10/14/2008 - Laserfiche WebLink

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CASE 14 UPDATE ON W4TER METER EXCHANGE PROGRAM By; John Nelson, Utilities Supervisor Background: In late February 2008 the Public Warps Committee and City Council approved a five yoar replacement project Involving all water meters In the City of Ramsey, Each year Public Works 744 water motors to a radia read meter, This personal will be exchanging approximately y exchanging meters that were past there life exchange program will benefit the City b expectancy, it will also make it possible for Public Works staff to do water meter readings in house by doing this we will also eliminate the need to contract out meter readings, Currently of letters to residents requesting them to schedule a time for City staff has sent out hundreds utility personal to .mare the exchange. Staffs also sent out many second and third notices, left door bangers and even went door to door to make the exchanges. With the exception of only a few non responders the program is on schedule for the 2008 portion of the program. As of September 41" the utilities department has cxchanged 502 water meters/registers and we have added 84 new radio read accounts to our City system, Meter reading The Utility department has currently read all. the now radio read accounts twice. Iii March staff read 168 meters and in June they rend 400 accounts and it took less than two hours to read all of them. We did however have two accounts that would not read and fortunately for us both, residents were home and we made repairs that day. Neptune shortly after our last reading had a recall for "battery life" on some of the meters that we already installed. Northern Water Supply is our distributer and has agreed to assist in several ways to replace any that fail in the field. Leak ,Detection One great feature with the Neptune a -coder i900 meters is the leak detection status. These new meters will alert us if there is an intermittent or continuous leak at the business or home and it will also, tell us how many days the leak occurred, In the June readings we found 23 meters that had a continuous leak, Staff drafted a lottar stating the issues relating this situation and sent out litters to each household and business, we received several phone calls bark from concerned citizens and ' each of them were going. to matte an effort to remedy the situation; and thanked us for the information staff provided. Exchanged metdrs With help from our seasonal staff we were able to disassemble all the old water meters by removing all the plastic, nuts and bolts, On August 8u, we into the fled 1, utility ounds of clean brass and received $8,773,16 and returned this money bact 6i[*'Z