AMR Development Trend in China¡¯s Water Sectors(continued)
Meter reading and fee collection workers are working at a poor condition
Low efficiency, but higher work load, most of the workers are female worker, theyaveragely need to enter 110 households everyday (80 to 140) and 2600 to 3000households every month, buildings are getting higher and higher, so it makes moredifficult for elder workers.
Waste in the process of usage and fee collection,fraud and refuse to pay
are often happened, which makes the fee less collected or not collected.
China¡¯s Water Meters
As the fast growth of Chinese economy and annual extensive increase of investment in domestic infrastructure, water meter as important measurement devices of waterusage for living and production has been attached greater importance. Water meterindustry has also been enlarged in its scale comparing to three years ago.The total water meter installed base in China now has reached about 200 million pieces (in operation), which is 54% of the total nationwide household numbers. It was estimated that the annual market demand was more than 30 million pieces in 2005, which are mainly supplied by around 300 local water meter suppliers.
In the residential market segment, most of the water meters installed in the past were multi jet vane wheel wet type CL A mechanical meters, which occupied more than 85 - 90% of the whole meter park. Since 2003, the water utilities started to require CL B,even CL C meters and all CL A meters will be phased out in future.
One of the main difficulties to Chinese water utilities now is the big water loss that is not measured and leaked. As the accuracy of the current universal type of meters is low at low water flow, especially to drop water the meters basically do not run. So the accuracy issue of water meter at low water flow has been one major reason of drop and leakage water measurement, and caused a big waste to water utilities. It has also been one of the reasons keeping the ratio higher of water production to water sales.
According to China's "one apartment one meter" policy, meter reading related to residential water measurement and billing to all residential areas must reach "each apartment", nowadays the market requires "reading to each apartment, but no entry".This has been a hot topic in Chinese water meter industry since two years. But the traditional mechanical water meters are installed in indoor, to read the meters, entry to apartment is a must or ask consumers to report the data, therefore disturbances to residents or security issues are existed. Therefore the accuracy of the meter and the traditional approach of manually reading meet the fast market development. It is also the main reason that the intelligent water meters are quickly developed in the market.
