AMR: The short words of Automatic Meter Reading

AMI: The short words of Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Before the introduction of AMR, utilities company had to do everything by hand. That send people to drive a long distance and spent 4-5 hours to edge of the service area, and record user consumption value. Then submit to internal staff to deal with all the data and create the bill. This will take a long period, that only bill customers once every two months or longer.

The AMR came about in the mid-’80s, and more prominently in the early 1990s as an automated way to collect basic meter-reading data. With AMR came the opportunity to utilize technology to reduce costs and improve productivity. According to the Demand Response and Advanced Metering Coalition, AMR is defined as a “system where aggregated kWh / water / gas usage, and in some cases demand, is retrieved via an automatic means such as a drive-by vehicle or walk-by handheld system.”These systems tend to be collection, data from AMR systems is typically gathered only monthly or, at most, daily.

Then came AMI around 2005, in which technology provided advances that utilities company executives could have hardly even dreamed of a decade earlier. This term and technology evolving from the foundations of AMR. All AMI systems contain AMR functionality (although it’s not the core of its purpose), but all AMR systems are not AMI systems.

AMI is typically more automated and allows real-time, on-demand interrogations with metering endpoints. The Federal Energy Regulatory Committee (FERC) defines AMI as “a metering system that records customer consumption hourly or more frequently and that provides for daily or more frequent transmittal of measurements over a communication network to a central collection point.”

AMI requires requisite bandwidth to supply more than merely metering and power-quality information. AMI systems need to have appropriate bandwidth and broadcast capabilities to allow for demand response/load management as well as distribution automation.

Available of AMR and AMI

AMR systems can typically provide the meter reading and possibly peak demand for each user. Depending on the system design, other data may also available in collection.

AMI typically provides a substantial payload of information. For example, in Power utilities company, the following information can be supplied via AMI systems:

Cumulative kWh usage,
Daily kWh usage,
Peak kW demand,
Last interval demand,
Load profile,
Voltage,
Voltage profile,
Logs of voltage sag and swell events,
Voltage event flags,
Phase information,
Outage counts,
Outage logs,
Tamper notification,
Power factor,
and time-of-use kWh and peak kW readings.

With high-end AMI systems, nearly all of this information is available in real time and on demand, allowing for improved operations and customer management.

AMI systems can also be used to verify power outages and service restoration, perform remote-service disconnects and reconnects, allow automated net metering, transmit demand-response and load-management messages, interrogate and control distribution-automation equipment and facilitate prepaid metering.

With AMI, user and utilities company can get reads on meters in real time, meaning that can get detailed consumption every day, or even every hour, rather than once a month. One benefit of this is identifying possible waste. For example, if hourly information is showing that water use in continuous, it likely means that there is a leak, and the utility can reach out to the customer to alert them to the possible problem.