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Installation of New Electric Meters Begins

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CARROLL COUNTY — Every customer of Carroll County Electric will soon have a brand new, Honeywell Elster electric meter that will eventually eliminate the need for door-to-door human meter readers.
A total of 15,300 meters for both residential and commercial customers are replacing the old analog meters. Sam Owen, an engineer with Carroll County Electric, said just over 3,500 new meters have been installed in Huntingdon, Trezevant, Atwood, and McLemoresville. About 200 are replaced each day by contractors for Advance Meter Services. The contractors will move into the McKenzie area this week. Owen said the new meters will help workers identify outages or problems in geographic regions or from a single customer.
The Honeywell Elster electric meter will transmit the customer’s usage to the central office.
Ryan Drewry, business manager, said the new meters and all the infrastructure cost $2.35 million, which the system had the cash reserves to pay in its entirety.

Initially, human meter readers will continue recording the customers’ usage until the system is fully operational, probably by mid-year.
Old analog meters will be salvaged and sold for recycling. Danny Brawner, system manager, said some of the newer analog meters will be placed in inventory as spares but will have to be read manually.
The department relies on fiber optics to back haul the data from each of the remote data collection points located at substations. Most of the fiber is now installed and extended to the central office in Huntingdon.
With the system upgrade including the fiber backbone, department employees are using a new fiber repair trailer in which on-site repairs can be made on the system’s fiber.