Columbia Water Leverages AMI to Transform Water Management

As a vibrant and growing city of the New South, Columbia, South Carolina, has developed a carefully crafted vision for its future, aimed at providing efficient, reliable and responsive municipal services for its residents. As part of that goal, the city and its water utility, Columbia Water, embarked on a comprehensive water meter upgrade project that would not only improve customer service and make utility operations more proactive but also support sustainability and smart city initiatives well into the future.

Columbia Water serves over 400,000 people across a 320-square-mile service area in the Midlands region of South Carolina, with more than 157,000 metered accounts. Until recently, despite many technological advances in the city, one thing hadn’t really changed since the early 1900s: how water meters were read.

“We were reading meters the old-fashioned way,” said Frank Eskridge, director of utility operations for Columbia Water. “We would send a person in a vehicle out to the meter. They would get out of the vehicle, walk over to the meter, open the lid, look at the meter and then punch in numbers on the handheld.”

It was a manual, labor-intensive process that required a team of 30 technicians reading 15,000 meters every two days to produce monthly bills. If anything got in the way of a meter read, such as a car parked over a meter or a major storm, Columbia Water would have to issue an estimated bill. Not only did this affect revenues for the utility, but it also led to complaints when customers eventually received bills reflecting their actual usage.

“We would have these makeup bills and people would get furious. They [would] go to the city council [to complain about it],” Eskridge said. As a result, “there was a gradual erosion in the confidence of the accuracy of our meter reads,” he explained.

To accomplish the City’s goals, Columbia Water needed to move away from reactive water management practices. As an early adopter of BlueEdge™ by Badger Meter, the utility gained control of customer water usage through actionable insight and proactive action to improve consumer confidence. By employing a suite of solutions from Badger Meter, Columbia Water has transitioned operations and realized greater levels of customer support for its services.

AMI Journey

Columbia Water previously experimented with automated meter reading (AMR) and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) pilot projects in 2012. Although the technologies were promising, the utility had too many competing priorities at the time to justify the investment. Then, in 2017, with help from consultant Jacobs Engineering, Columbia Water was finally ready to tackle its aging water metering infrastructure and provide the measurement accuracy and transparency its customers were asking for.

The project was put out for bid and, ultimately, Columbia Water selected Badger Meter as its partner to modernize the outdated metering system with several smart water technologies, including BEACON^® Software as a Service (SaaS), ORION^® Cellular endpoints, Recordall^® Disc Series meters and E-Series^® Ultrasonic meters. These solutions deliver accurate measurement data, viewable from anywhere in the field or office.

Using existing cellular networks, BEACON makes meter reading more efficient (15-minute interval data is accessible from anywhere in the network) and scalable for the long term. Rather than maintaining a separate communication system, utility staff are free to tackle other work.

“We viewed that as an opportunity for us to focus as a utility on our core competencies of providing excellent water, excellent customer service and let another party [manage] communication technology,” said Columbia’s Assistant City Manager Clint Shealy.

The AMI installation began in March 2019 and continued over three-and-a-half years. Because of the size and scope of the project, Columbia Water engaged the Badger Meter Turnkey Operations (TKOps) team for project management, expertise and to ensure that the proper steps were followed during the meter change-out process. This proved especially valuable when a global pandemic midway through installation threatened to affect the supply-chain and other resources. The TKOps team from Badger Meter ensured that installation was completed on time and under budget, while mitigating risk to the utility and ensuring proper installation. To date, the Columbia Water project is one of the largest AMI installations in the United States.

Operational Efficiency

BlueEdge delivers a holistic view of water utility and metering system performance at a glance. Using BEACON software, the utility was able to be more efficient and proactive after a multi-day freeze event in 2022.

“On Christmas weekend, we were flowing 90 million gallons a day because we had water mains breaking all over the place,” Eskridge recalled. He turned to the powerful analytics available in BEACON. “Not a mile from where I was sitting, there was an office building that had been using 1,000 gallons a minute since the middle of the afternoon on Christmas Day [when no one was in the building],” he said. “That was 1.5 MGD in one place!”

The BEACON dashboard provided the location of a burst fire line, and the utility was able to dispatch a crew to the location within minutes to shut off the water.

BEACON also displays accurate meter reads automatically at 15-minute intervals from ORION Cellular endpoints, bringing Columbia Water other operational benefits, including a 96% reduction in monthly service calls. Prior to the AMI installation, “the confidence in our reads was so bad that we were having to send a technician in a truck out to conduct a re-read a thousand times every month,” Eskridge said.

The number of times that the utility had to send a technician into the field before moving to a cellular-based AMI network went from more than 1,000 times per month to as little as 30 times per month. Furthermore, with the increased meter accuracy, Columbia Water has seen a 21% decrease in the number of inactive accounts consuming water. By lowering the amount of non-revenue water in their system, operators are approaching system management proactively.

There has also been a marked improvement in employee morale. “I noticed my meter reading staff was happier,” Eskridge said. “They were more relaxed … because they weren't having to read 15,000 meters every two days.”

Recordall^® Disc Series meters & E-Series^® Ultrasonic meters deliver accurate measurement data for Columbia Water. Photo courtesy Columbia Water Communications Team.

Better Customer Service

Columbia Water’s AMI system includes the EyeOnWater^® consumer engagement tool, which provides customers with access to their own water consumption. They can view water usage in near real-time, set alerts and catch issues early—before they result in high bills.

“If the customer doesn't realize that they've got a leaking toilet or a leak on their irrigation system, they get the shock of a high water bill,” Shealy noted. With EyeOnWater, however, customers can set a leak alert notifying them that there’s an issue. “[They can] call a plumber, investigate, and minimize that shock, minimize that impact, [and conserve more water]” he added.

“We have found that the information from EyeOnWater has transformed our ability to talk to our customers about what's going on at their house,” Eskridge added.

“We can tell them down to the hour when the water was used, which specific day it was used, and that is a benefit for not only the customer service representative but also the customer,” said Angela McCullough, Special Projects Administrator, Columbia Water.

“For the city of Columbia, and Columbia Water as an organization, customer service is really important for us,” said Shealy. “It's one of the more critical things that we do.” Sending accurate water bills to customers ensures “that we operate with core values of accountability, transparency and integrity,” he added.

Recognized for Excellence

In 2020, the Columbia Water AMI upgrade project received a Smart 50 Award in the “Urban Operations” category. The Smart 50 Awards, in partnership with Smart Cities Connect, Smart Cities Connect Foundation and US Ignite, honor the 50 most transformative smart projects each year.

“From hundreds of applicants and over one dozen countries, the Smart 50 Award review committee selected the project laid out by Columbia, South Carolina, and Badger Meter because it innovatively tackles water infrastructure challenges,” said Laura Benold, managing editor for Smart Cities Connect Media & Research. “Not only does their smart approach solve operational challenges for the municipality, it also empowers residents.”

“It's important that smart cities, that thoughtful cities, are focused on utilizing our resources as efficiently and as effectively as possible by building out that smart city infrastructure to do it,” said former Columbia Mayor Stephen Benjamin. “We're excited about it. I can't wait to see what the future brings.”

Planning for the Future

Columbia Water’s AMI system was built with extensibility in mind. In the future, the utility can add BlueEdge capabilities, such as water quality and pressure monitoring to their system, for deeper insights into water system performance.