A USB water meter developed by Danish firm Kamstup was presented at the African Utilities Week (AUW) conference and exhibition at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) yesterday.
Petrus van Heerden, South African manager for Kamstup, presented the M-Hub USB water meter readers, which includes LEDs on the readers which indicates the activities of the device, such as “reading in progress” or “no more meters to read”, and automatic meter type detection.
The device can read up to 4,000 meters in a system.
Before the USB water meter readers can be used, the “easy to use” software must be downloaded from Kamstup’s website onto a computer.
The actual meters’ information must then be loaded into the software program. Van Heerden said: “You would walk past the meters, the handheld [USB device] will pick up [information] as you go past the meters. Then you bring it back and plug this thing (USB) into your computer…” and the meter data is loaded.
“The other way is to… plug [the USB] directly into the computer. So in this way you will use the computer as the base” instead of the handheld device “to read the meters, so long as they’re in range,” said van Heerden.
“Once you have all the data, you can basically export it for billing purposes, you can use it for analysis purposes…” said van Heerden. The data collected by the USB meter reader can be exported to XML, PDF, DFF and CSV formats.
The USB water meter reader is able to read all Kamstup water meters from the smallest to the largest.
