Locating water meters
In common with many water companies, South East Water are now installing water meters for many of their domestic clients. This move is encouraged by OFWAT and should help save scarce water. OSYS was asked to help the Company in looking at ways in which the precise sites for the first tranche of approximately five hundred thousand meters might be installed, and then their positions recorded. In view of the numbers involved, surveyors would need to mover quickly down streets planned for installation programmes, recording the proposed sites. Historically most utilities have recorded the positions of their water mains quite accurately, however the service pipes, many of which actually belong to the individual property owner after the stop valve and which date back many years, have seldom been recorded on a map.
Using OSYS’s experience in underground plant and in digital mapping, we were asked to recommend methods by which the surveys might be done, and data collected on the existing in-house tablet computers. We also looked at some preripheral issues, such as how buried or obscured radio-read meters might be located at end-of-life.
