If you’re a regular here, you’ve probably noticed that we like to talk about meters every now and then.

In the summertime, we remind customers to cut back their vegetation so that our meter readers can do their job quickly and easily.  In the winter, we give a similar reminder to clear snow away from the meters and meter pits. And of course, even the friendliest dogs don’t always like strangers visiting their yard, so we ask folks to be careful with their pets, too.

Doing all of that is a huge help. After all, seconds matter when you’ve got about 46,000 electric meters to read every month. (Never mind the 30,000 or so water meters!)

But what if those meters read themselves?

That’s getting closer. This spring, Longmont will be installing about 500 brand-new electric meters in southern Longmont, the beginning of what’s sometimes called advanced metering infrastructure or AMI. After taking some time to see how that installation went and how the meters are performing, LPC will then begin installing them in the rest of the city, starting in late 2022 and continuing for about a year.

What makes these so advanced? Instead of being checked by a visiting meter reader once per month, these electric meters will read themselves once an hour. That makes a lot of cool things possible:

• It means we’ll know about outages sooner and respond to them faster.
• It means customers will eventually be able to see their own daily energy usage, allowing them to make more energy-efficient choices.
• It means we may eventually be able to set lower electric rates during times when electric demand is lower.

There’s some more details in our recent announcement, including a map and description of that initial area. And if you’d rather stay with a manually-read meter – the kind that your Labrador has been faithfully guarding – there will be an option for that, with an added fee to cover the cost.

Interested? Keep watching this space, our Facebook page and other LPC outlets because we’ll definitely have more to share.

After all, when it comes to meters, there’s always plenty to read.