By Hayley Ferguson

Power Meters

Automated power meters coming to Cypress County

Aug 23, 2019 | 5:08 PM

Cypress County, AB – Residents in both Cypress and Forty Mile counties are getting a power meter upgrade.

According to power provider EQUS, they will be bringing automated power meters to the counties by the end of 2020.

Rick Maclise, who is the project manager, says that these meters have several advantages for rural customers.

He says that the upgrades mean an employee, or even the customer, will no longer need to manually read the meters.

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Instead, he says, they will be able to see every 15 minutes, a snapshot of how much power is being used on a property.

Allowing EQUS to easily see what kind of stress is being put on their system in a specific area.

“The other nice benefit for our members is that when the power goes out, the meters will tell us that there’s power out and so the idea being that they won’t have to phone in and say that they have a power outage,” Maclise said. “We’ll be able to see that well ahead of them phoning in. And so it helps out troubleshoot our system and get the power restored as quickly as possible.”

Maclise says the vastness of the area is a challenge.

“Especially in the south area, it can become a challenge to get the communication between the meters solid enough. So again, having enough infrastructure in those areas to support the meters communicating with each other is a challenge. But we’ve got a vendor that is using the technology in a little bit different applications.” He said.

In 2018, EQUS did a pilot project in the Sundre area.

“It worked very well.” He described. “We’re pretty excited that we can extend this technology in the rural area and make it work.”