The Otay Water District currently serves 49,000 accounts and over 23,000 of these are auto meter read (AMR) meters.  By 2015, it is expected that the entire District’s meters will be AMR meters.   These meters are read once a month by driving a district vehicle down the street.  A signal in the meter transmits to an antenna on the vehicle and the reads are downloaded into a laptop computer. With the AMR system, Field Representatives are able to read approximately 2500 meters in 4 hours versus 700 meters in 8 hours, depending upon the route.  Multiple routes now can be merged and completed in the same time it took to read one route.

As part of the District’s ongoing commitment to quality control, the meter reading team does a comparison of the radio read to a manual read at least once a year.