Answers to Your Estimated Bill Woes
Mount Pleasant Waterworks has been very busy lately responding to a number of questions and concerns regarding estimated bills. MPW would like to apologize about any confusion regarding your bill, and would like to try and address some of our customers’ questions and concerns.
Staff and Commissioners care about the responsibility and trust that you put in our organization and work hard to make good decisions and have good business practices. We have experienced problems with our meter reading process and rectifying this issue is our highest priority.
History of the Automated Meter Readers
In 2001, Mount Pleasant Waterworks began installing automated meter reading devices. When working properly, electronic transmitters allow many water meters to be read remotely at one time by sending meter readings to a laptop computer in the truck.
Prior to this, a meter reader walked through neighborhoods and stopped at each meter to manually record the amount of water used. This wireless radio system, known as Automated Meter Reading or AMR, remotely reads meters and then transfers the data to the billing system. Using AMR will ultimately make the meter reading process more efficient and should provide savings to our customers.
The automated meter reading equipment we originally selected worked well. We ran a pilot study to extensively test the equipment before installation on a wide scale. In fact, my house still has one of the pilot test AMR devices that is working great today and has never had a problem.
A challenge raised with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) related to the FCC approved radio transmission equipment prompted the manufacturer to modify the design of the equipment. The meters recorded the usage accurately, but these modified radio transmitters began to fail faster than we could replace them. In an even worse turn of events, some of the replacements began to fail. We have negotiated with the company which provided the AMR devices, Hersey Meters of Cleveland, N.C., to correct these problems and to reimburse MPW for the cost.
Why the estimated bill?
So how do these problems cause customers to have estimated bills? The AMR devices were failing at such a rate that we were unable to obtain actual reads of water used. In order to continue monthly billing MPW had to estimate some customer’s usage based on their previous consumption history. In some cases we estimated bills for several months. We recently added meter readers to visually read all the meters. Many customers who were receiving an estimated bill had their meter visually read. In many cases the actual consumption over the estimated period was more because our estimates were low. While this “catch up” bill is accurate, the higher bill caused confusion and frustration; especially if Tier charges were added for excessive use. For the typical residential user tier charges are a rate structure based on usage over 9,200 gallons.
How we are fixing the problem
We have currently created an action plan to solve these problems, which include:
- We are reviewing the “catch up” bills of all customers with an estimated bill and removing Tier charges if they were incorrectly added.
- We have added staff to visually read meters and reduce the number of estimated bills.
- The Mount Pleasant Waterworks Commissioners voted to suspend all Tier charges for two months while staff works to resolve our billing process issues.
- Reassigned staff to remove and replace the failed transmitters.
The suspension of Tier charges will allow us to send out bills that do not have excessive use charges added onto the “catch up” bills.
We want to assure our customers we will fix this problem and greatly appreciate their patience and understanding.
(Clay Duffie is General Manager of Mount Pleasant Waterworks and has more than 30 years of experience in water and wastewater management practice. He is a past President of the South Carolina Water Pollution Control Association and the SC Section of the American Water Works Association (AWWA) and has led numerous national seminars on environmental, leadership and utility management issues.)
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It's All About Clean Water - Water by the Numbers - MPW
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It's All About Clean Water - Part 3 of 3 - Septic Systems
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--Press Room
