Easy reading, old electricity meters replaced by digital version

Elihu Thomson's invention has had a nice 121-year run, but it's making way for a newer electricity meter.

Utilities in the Modesto area have started replacing the old meters -- the kind with five dials that slowly spin around and around -- with high-tech models that give digital readouts.

These "smart" meters will be read by remote control, rather than utility workers on foot. They also will help pinpoint outages and provide for service connections and disconnections from a distance.

The Modesto Irrigation District this month started a six-month effort to replace all 100,000 or so meters in its electricity service area.

"The changeout takes about five minutes," MID spokeswoman Kate Hora said during a demonstration of the process Wednesday.

With that, the customer will have taken one giant leap from the low-tech meters that were based on an 1888 invention by Thomson, a colleague of Thomas Edison and co-founder of General Electric.

"This has been in use pretty much unchanged since the 1880s," Hora said.

The Turlock Irrigation District late last year launched a four-year conversion for its roughly 98,000 electricity customers, spokeswoman Michelle Reimers said.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. is replacing power and gas meters on a schedule that goes through 2011.

All three utilities aim to put the displaced meter readers into vacant jobs elsewhere in their operations.

They also expect to save plenty of money on labor and vehicle fuel by reading the readers remotely. TheMID, for example, estimates that it will recoup the $21.3 million cost of the new meters within 10 years.

The MID has sent mailers about the conversion to all customers and is following up with reminders one to three weeks before the work in each neighborhood.

Residential customers do not have to be home during the changeout, but they do need to allow access to the meters. The process requires an outage of about one minute, so customers might need to reset their clocks, Hora said.

The MID will read each new meter on foot during a test period of two to three months.

After that, the power-use data will be transmitted by radio waves to one of 26 collection points around the district. The data then will travel by fiber- optic lines or cellular telephone to the MID's downtown Modesto headquarters.

As of Wednesday, about 1,500 MID meters had been switched, Hora said. Those at homes are being done on contract by Wellington Energy Inc., based in Pennsylvania. District employees are handling businesses.

The TID had converted 2,635 meters as of Wednesday, Reim- ers said.

Smart meters record electricity use in increments much smaller than the old technology. Eventually, the utilities could adopt time-of-use billing, which would provide lower rates to customers who run appliances late at night and at other times of low demand.

"Smart meters make good economic sense for consumers and utilities alike in this time of rising electric rates," Tom Kimball, MID's assistant general manager for transmission and distribution, said in a news release.

Bee staff writer John Holland can be reached at jholland@modbee.com or 578-2385.

This story was originally published January 22, 2009 at 2:47 AM with the headline "Easy reading, old electricity meters replaced by digital version."