JACKSONVILLE, Texas — February’s winter freeze caused havoc on water systems across the state of Texas, but the city of Jacksonville took a less severe blow thanks to a recent citywide installation of new smart water meters. Which cost nearly $5.8 million.
"The project was completed almost a year ago. We replace more than 5,000 residential water meters," Randall Chandlor, community and public services for the City of Jacksonville, said.
They are able to see pressure at the meter as well as do remote turn on‘s and turn off‘s.
"Every residential customer or commercial customer can log on to a customer portal you can actually manage your water account, get information from your phone, your laptop and you can monitor your water usage and get alerts so you may know you have a problem. If you need your water turned off because you have a water leak, you call, we can do it right then, once we verify it is you and at your address," Greg Smith, Jacksonville City Manager said.
"The remote disconnect to meters gives you the data today like other smart meters, but it enables you to have control over are they running or are they not running. Turn off that allows the meters to be turned off to prevent homes from having burst pipes," Jonathan Blackwell, with AMI water meter solutions, said.
"We were able to cartel leaks at residences that could’ve been as much as 30,000 gallons a day, to either unknowing homeowners who may not have been home or property owners that were there and didn’t realize they had a leak," Chandlor said.
It would be hundreds of millions of dollars damage that was saved from these meters. We were pumping nearly double what the water consumption was normally and so we were losing almost more water than we could produce, and we were getting ourselves into some critical situation. The system we put in saved as millions of gallons of water without a shadow of a doubt," Chandlor said.
Jacksonville is believed to be the only city in the country that has installed the ally sensus water meters in all the residential customer homes.
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