The City of Klamath Falls maintains an ongoing water meter replacement program to replace old worn inaccurate meters that have been in service for 10 years or more. As water meters age they tend to slow down and fail to register accurately the amount of water used by the consumer, especially at small or lower flow rates. Maintaining accurate meters throughout the system helps reduce unaccounted for water losses or in other words non-revenue water, in turn encouraging our customers to conserve water, reducing the cost of energy necessary to produce and pump water to our customers ultimately allowing the City to maintain more consistent water rates.
Meter technology has greatly improved throughout the years. The meters being installed today have no moving parts that can wear out and can accurately measure as little as 0.03 gallons per minute whereas the meters that were used just 10 years ago would only accurately measure as little as 0.25 gallons per minute when they were new. Another element of the meter replacement program is transitioning from manually read meters to radio read meters (AMR) and ultimately to an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). Radio read meters can be read remotely from several miles away while an AMI system can read meters remotely from a single centralized location and can monitor water usage at each meter in the system on an hourly timeframe.