The Tribune

By Fay Simmons

Tribune Business Reporter

jsimmons@tribunemedia.net

The Water and Sewerage Corporation yesterday said it plans to switch to billing customers on a monthly basis during the 2024 fourth quarter as it installed its first digital water meter on New Providence.

Montgomery Miller, the Corporation’s manager of strategic co-ordination, said the utility has begun the process of transitioning analog water meters to digital ones. This will help facilitate the switch from a three-month or quarterly billing cycle to a monthly one, and allow consumers to detect leaks on their properties much quicker.

He said: “One of the largest challenges that we as a Corporation have faced is customers that have undetected leaks. Many of you probably have had the experience of a toilet flapper valve or something that’s gone bad, and that toilet is continuously running.

“But many people don’t recognise that that’s actually water wasting. Under the current regime the Corporation issues bills on a quarterly basis every 90 days or so. And so a lot of times customers are met with at the end of that cycle a very large water bill.”

Mr Miller said the digital meters will also allow staff to read meters remotely, eliminating the need for them to enter a property. He added: “We can pick that reading up remotely. Technology is currently being utilised by our sister utility, BPL, and so one of the big advantages is we will reduce our billing and reading schedule down to 30 days as opposed to 90 days in the first instance.

“So that risk of the high consumption due to leakage is going to be reduced in the first instance and, we hope, hopefully very near eliminated.” Mr Miller said the Water & Sewerage Corporation has plans to acquire 65,000 digital meters to be installed in New Providence once a $10m Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) loan has been finalised.

He said: “We’ve made a purchase of the initial 5,000 residential meters and we’ll be transitioning to procure the next 10,000 in very short order. Then, ultimately, the entire residential population, which is about 65,000 units, will be implemented under pending approval of an IDB loan that we are presently working to get completed with this technology when it comes to installation.

Last year, the Water & Sewerage Corporation unveiled artificial intelligence (AI) technology to detect leaks in partnership with Miya, which was awarded a contract for a 10-year, $83m effort to maximise efficiency of New Providence’s water system

Since 2012, Miya has saved the Water & Sewerage Corporation over 14bn imperial gallons in water that would have been lost to leaks. The utility currently loses about 3m imperial gallons per day, down from 6.9m imperial gallons per day at the start of the project.

Mr Miller said the transition to digital meters is a step in moving the non-revenue water conservation project forward and help to achieve water balancing.

He added: “It was always envisioned in the initial project that we did that we would actually move to a smart metering system so that we can achieve what they call water balancing, or checking, to see what the consumer is measuring at the end versus what’s being put into supply.

“We will move more towards a deployment of persons that are focused on network leak management and detection, as opposed to a basic manual reading. So we’re making a transition to utilising the technology.

“The ultimate vision when this project is done is to move to a fixed network situation where there’s real-time monitoring. In the long-term, what we’re looking to is when there is an issue at the customer end, the customer is receiving prompt notification so that it really manages their risk.”

Mr Miller also encouraged residents that have private wells to move to potable water provided by Water & Sewerage Corporation as they have conducted tests of more than 400 private wells and found the water to be contaminated.

He said: “We have a general concern about the number of consumers on New Providence that are using private wells that are untested and untreated. And actually, in the scope of our corporate business plan recently, we conducted 400 or so private well tests, and we discovered that water to be contaminated.”