Hampton Bays Water District Embarks on Sweeping Replacement of Meters, Billing Software To Boost Efficiency, Cut Waste

Residents who are serviced by the Hampton Bays Water District will be getting upgraded water meters over the next three to five years that will make it easier for the district to track water usage and efficiency, detect leaks more quickly and bill more conveniently — while also saving the district’s staff hundreds of hours of labor a year that will free them to tackle other tasks.

The district is in the midst of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar replacement of all of the more than 5,000 commercial and residential meters on the district’s water supply lines.

Once completed, the new meters will allow the district’s meter readers to upload information from meters remotely from a vehicle by simply driving past a property — rather than having to walk onto each property and connect a handheld meter reader to the meter itself as they have to now.

Water usage information, which currently takes the district’s meter-reading team a month to collect, could be gathered in as little as a day.

“Right now it’s a touchpad system, so we have to manually go up to the meter — we have three guys that go out and collect the data into a handheld then come back and upload it,” the water district’s superintendent, James Kappers, told members of the Southampton Town Board last month. “Before this, you had to take a key and open up [the meter] and write it down in a little book, so we’ve come a long way from where we were, and we’re now taking the next step, which will free up our manpower to do other things we’ve been putting off like hydrant maintenance.”

Along with freeing up the staff to do other things, the quicker collection of water usage will also greatly improve the ability of the district to catch anomalies in water usage that might indicate leaks in a property’s water lines or a residential sprinkler system — preventing waste and the potential for property damage. It will also allow the district to track efficiency in water usage, and offer guidance to property owners for improving their usage, saving money.

“We can miss a leak for three months now because it takes us that long to collect the data from the district,” the superintendent said.

The district has already replaced all of its largest commercial 9-inch, 6-inch and 4-inch meters and has ordered 146 of the 2-inch meters used by small commercial properties and large homes. Then it will dive into the largest chunk of the project, the replacement of more than 3,000 1-inch meters, the most common at residential properties, and about 2,000 5/8-inch meters.

The replacement of the meters will not have any rate impact for water district customers. The meter replacements are being paid for with a bond taken out by the town, and Kappers said the district is also applying for grant funding to help pay for the shift to more efficient meters.

The district is also upgrading its billing software.

“It’s going to be much more customer friendly,” he said. “There will be individual portals and auto-payments. It will be very smooth and transparent.”