Perennial Starts AMI Deployment
by Brandon Lehman Manager of Engineering
On December 18th, 2007 the Perennial Board of Directors approved the purchase
of an AMI system. AMI is an acronym for Advanced Metering Infrastructure.
There are three components which make up the infrastructure. Servers at
the office, injection equipment at the substations, and the meter at your
residence, business, or irrigation well. Perennial’s goal is to have the
system completely installed in two years. There are approximately 7500
meters that will be change and 15 substations which will need to be retrofitted.
Once the system is installed Perennial will be able to “read” your meter
from our office. There are many expected benefits this system will bring
to our District. A few of these include, no self-reads for customers, minimized
outage restoration times, and a reduced number of estimated bills.
How Our AMI works
To start the process of a simple meter reading a command is sent from the server at the office. The command travels through our radio communication link from the office to the substation. At the substation a signal is injected onto the power lines. The signal travels to every meter connected to that particular substation. The signal is received and decoded by the meter. The meter replies with the information that was requested from the server and sends a signal back to the substation. The substation injection equipment relays the information back to the server at the office via the radio. It takes approximately 3 to 6 seconds for the process to be completed.
Current Project Status as of August 26, 2008
Even though our workload was shifted temporarily to the new Pioneer Substation and outage calls for irrigation, we continued to install new AMI meters on services feeding from the York Substation. We currently have 718 AMI meters installed system wide. The meters are not being used for billing purposes yet, but when that time comes we will make a formal announcement. In the meantime please continue to record and send in your meter readings as long as you see a place for readings on your bill.
Currently the 718 meters installed are being used to record voltage and to monitor irrigation load control status in that area. When installations are completed on circuits out of the York Substation, we will focus on the Thayer Substation.
Reading the new meters
One of the many benefits of having AMI meters is that soon customers won't have to make that monthly trip out to the pole to read their meter. We realize though that some customers will still want to continue reading their meters for their own purposes. For that reason we have provided these pictures to show you How to read your new meter. Remember, if you are currently sending us monthly readings, please continue to do so until we notify you otherwise.
