Despite issues with an outsourced contractor, the San Antonio Water System is running on schedule for replacing its dated analog water meters with new digital smart meters, SAWS staff told its board of trustees Tuesday morning.
However, the cost for the project — titled the ConnectH2O program — will be about $5 to $10 million more than original estimates, said SAWS Vice President of Customer Experience and Strategic Initiatives Cecilia Velasquez. SAWS board originally approved $215.2 million for a full system-wide deployment of the ConnectH2O program in December of 2021.
“[Switching contractors] definitely impacted us,” Velasquez said. “We’re still trying to see what the end result will be.”
At 139,000 new meters installed, SAWS has completed installation for roughly 20% of the city, Velasquez said. SAWS expects to finish replacing all 600,000 meters by December 2026, she added. The new meters allow SAWS customers to track their water use in near real-time, rather than relying on monthly reading reports by a meter reader.
At full deployment, SAWS expects the new digital meters could help the system and its customers save as much as 240 million gallons per year, said SAWS Vice President of Water Conservation Karen Guz. The new smart meters are able to help SAWS staff identify leaks faster and alert customers more quickly, Guz explained.
Guz noted the smart meters also helped a significant amount of residents to become aware that their irrigation systems were activating more than once a week (the limited amount under SAWS Stage 2 drought restrictions), and that 51% of the residents who were alerted to this trend fixed the issue within two weeks.
“As we install these in neighborhoods, we are also being able to develop a better handle on water that’s going into the neighborhood and water that’s actually being consumed at the addresses; that can also point us then to if there are any leaks on the main,” she said.
SAWS initially contracted with Kentucky-based tech company Vanguard Utility Services as its smart meter installer, however the utility “broke up” with Vanguard last fall after the company started falling significantly behind on SAWS’ timeline, Guz told the San Antonio Report. It also hired Itron as the meters’ network provider.
“We have pretty high expectations about the speed of installation and the quality of installation,” she said. “They were not performing and so SAWS had to say, ‘Okay, we’ve tried this and it is not working out.'”
The utility’s trustees approved making Wisconsin-based utility tech company Olameter Corp. its new contractor in September and refocused internal efforts to speed up the rate of installations. The new contract with Olameter, which will cost the utility up to $5.7 million over three years, assures the company will provide monthly meter readings.
“We’re doing a lot of installation ourselves, and then we have this contractor, and so between the two we’re really speeding up,” Guz said.
