Smart Meter Prepayments

The SmartMeter Prepayment water system is a revolutionary and complete ‘water metering solution’. SmartMeter Prepayment water metering provides many benefits to both water companies and end users, including guaranteed revenue and arrears collection, extensive management tools through detailed report functionality and the ability for customers to manage their budgets more easily.

SmartMeter Prepayment is a straightforward and user friendly system to operate, as it uses a Smart Card to handle credit and monitor water use. Customers purchase credit at vending points, providing an opportunity to download new tariff data. Simultaneously, data from the meter, stored on the Smart Card, is uploaded and sent to the utility headquarters.

Installed in a convenient place inside the home or business, the SmartMeter Prepayment Internal Unit communicates with the external meter box, housing the meter and control valve, using wireless radio. The SmartMeter Prepayment Internal Unit is the customer’s interface and requires the Smart Card to be inserted for it to work. It displays the credit status and gives useful information about the volume of water remaining, tariff status and potential leakage.

SmartMeter Prepayment guarantees payment prior to water distribution. SmartMeter Prepayment dramatically reduces operating overheads by removing the need for a billing department or meter readers. The SmartMeter Prepayment water system provides the safest financial solution in water metering today.

“Pareto’s Principle” or the “80-20 rule” states that 20% of the population controls 80% of the wealth, which is as true with bulk metering. Even though the number of industrial applications are considerably less than domestic, they provide significant revenue, due to their considerably higher annual consumption.

Guaranteed monies prior to supply, especially from these large customers can dramatically assist in development of other areas of the water network, reducing overall network leakage and reducing both technical and real revenue loses.

Benefits for the water company include: flexible tariffing, different shut-off levels which overcome traditional hurdles to prepayment, an automatic and remotely controlled system thus no customer visits required after installation and two-way communication between customers and the utility. The system also provides many of the benefits of Automatic Meter Reading systems including protected long-term revenues with guaranteed accuracy and no visits to the customer’s property required to read meters.

Benefits for the customer include: customers are in control of their own budgets, water supply is not cut off unexpectedly and less administration helps to keep prices more affordable.