The Lewis County PUD’s Meter Refresh program is coming your way soon! In the coming months, you may see a PUD representative working on your meter. Don’t worry, they are just making enhancements to your meter.
On the rare occasion that access to your home or property is needed, we’ll call to schedule an appointment at your convenience. Once our work is done, you’ll find a notice on your door knob to let you know we’re finished.
What the upgrade means for you
Improved outage response
The new meters will help us respond to outages faster and with greater precision. If an outage occurs, the advanced meters can help the PUD locate and resolve the problem and restore power even more quickly.
Better billing
At pre-determined, regular intervals, your meter will send the PUD data on how much energy you’ve consumed, eliminating the need for a PUD employee to manually read your meter. This gives us better and more timely information to prepare your bill.
AMI Frequently Asked Questions
- Lewis County PUD is constantly upgrading and improving its electrical distribution system to provide our customers the best and most reliable service available. The Meter Refresh Program is the next way we are improving our system. AMI will allow us to save money by reading the meters remotely and it will improve outage restoration times by sending alerts when you are out of power. It will also allow customers to better monitor their usage with up to the hour capabilities.
- Meter replacement is expected to begin in 2023 and go through 2024.
- An advanced meter is a digital device that collects energy-use information, measured in kilowatt hours, and sends that data to the utility. An advanced meter can also receive information back from the PUD. The information to and from the advanced meter is encrypted and sent through a secure wireless network. As of 2021, there were about 111 million advanced meters installed throughout the United States.
- The District has a combination of traditional analog spinning disc meters, digital meters with no communications, and digital meters read from a remote handheld device.
- Advanced meters help us deliver electric services more efficiently and put our customers in greater control of their energy use.
- Advanced meters provide faster outage detection and restoration without having to wait for you to call, and more accurately pinpoint the problem area for our crews.
- Advanced meters reduce environmental impact by not having to send out employees to read meters saving thousands of miles of travel and carbon emissions.
- Advanced meters allow customers to sign up for energy alerts to let them know when energy use is greater than what they budgeted. This can help you detect if there is an issue with an appliance or equipment such as a hot water heater or a heat pump.
- Improve billing accuracy, eliminating misreads or inaccurate readings.
- You’ll be able to see your daily energy-use information, which helps you make more informed energy-related decisions. Knowing when you use the most electricity, and finding ways to reduce consumption, can help you reduce costs.
- The new meters also provide efficiencies for the PUD, creating cost savings that can help stabilize rates. In the future, advanced metering will be able to tell us how much electricity is being used and where it’s going. This will help us better understand the power grid and more efficiently manage the distribution system.
- The advanced metering system will also allow Lewis County PUD to manage the electric grid more efficiently, reducing waste. Advanced meters will also help reduce our carbon footprint.
- Today, the meter reader contractors we use drive thousands of miles a year around Lewis County to collect customer data. All that driving represents a lot of carbon dioxide emissions that will be drastically reduced using advanced meters.
- With about 111 million advanced meters currently operating safely in the U.S. the PUD is confident advanced meters are safe for Lewis County. However, some of our citizens have brought up concerns about exposure to radio frequency emissions from advanced meters.
- Advanced meters do use low energy radio frequency (RF) to transmit data. Radio frequency is a form of electromagnetic energy used by a number of household devices like cell phones, baby monitors, and WiFi routers to transmit information. Unlike those household devices, our meters can be programmed to transmit signals as infrequently as once every four hours, meaning total transmission time is far less than one minute per day.
- In one 30 minute cell phone call you receive more signal than an advanced meter produces in 20 years.
- The advanced metering network the PUD plans to use will have multiple layers of protection, similar to security used with online banking and ATM machines. Personal identifying information (such as name, address, or account number) is not stored in the meter, nor is it sent through the wireless network. Only the meter’s serial number and the usage data will be collected and transmitted. All transmitted information will be secure and protected through encryption within the network.
- There is no additional cost to the customer for the replacement meter.
- The project costs have been built into the PUD’s budget. The entire project is estimated to cost the PUD $5.3 million, which is less than originally budgeted. The PUD expects to recoup the costs of the project within 4 to 4.5 Years through more accurate meter reads, less PUD staff requirements, fewer third-party meter reading costs, better customer communications, better outage management, and better system controls. The overall project will reduce District operating costs long after the initial payback period.
- While some customers will see little to no change in their individual usage and billing, customers whose residences that currently have faulty or underperforming meters may see changes to their bill when a new advanced meter is installed and reading and reporting usage data accurately.
- Yes. An application will be posted before the project takes place. An additional $50 monthly fee will be added to the customer’s bill to recover the PUD’s costs to perform manual readings of the meter.
