Technology - Wireless Automated Meter Reading System

Wireless Automated Meter Reading System

A low-cost wireless automated utility meter reading system for real-time utility monitoring

Background:

Single family residential structures will typically have one gas and one electric meter and may also have a water meter. Multi‑unit structures have numerous meters, such meters are provided by utility serving the structure and provide multi decade lifespan. Conventional meters provide a cumulative measurement of the amount of gas water steam or electric passing through respective meters. The responsibility utility renders a bill to the customer, and it is done through manually reading the meter once every few months, and at a time one will read a meter once per year. To overcome the need to manually read the meters, the proposed is an automated meter reading system.

Technology Overview:

The present invention operates in an open source format, without the requirement for a dedicated network or a power source permanently mounted on the meter. An energy conservation method is implemented with a meter that has a transducer retrofit, the meter includes a rotating shaft that drives a meter reading dial and detects rotation through the shaft. It is able to identify each specific appliance by differentiating the volumes of each time interval. There is an encoder device, wherein a volume received by a specific appliance is identified by the consumption signature of the appliance.

Please note, header image is purely illustrative. Source: Monty Dickerson, PIXNIO, CC0.

Advantages:

To assure efficient energy usage, integration of several elements is important, such as accurately measuring energy a first element is used to measure energy provided by natural gas, a second for energy consumed by the appliances of the meter, the boiler that is connected to the gas meter and a third element is to provide feedback to optimize energy usage, providing high resolution recording of the utility consumption information.