Water bills received by customers this month will have an estimated rate due to a delay in the installation of new technology to read meter rates.

The city is upgrading the majority of its water meters with new transmitters to allow staff to record meter rates in a quicker, more efficient way, officials said.

Daniel Arthur, director of public works in Monroe, said the public works staff has been working since May to install new electronic transmitters on the Badger Meters used by 80 percent of the city’s water customers — or about 3,500 homes.

The new transmitters reduce the number of days meter-readers have to drive by homes to record meter rates.

“There was a delay with the server and getting the transmitters,” Arthur said of communications between Dell and Badger Meter. “Once the equipment is in place and operating, we will receive the actual data from the transmitter, and any variances between the estimated and actual usages will be adjusted on the next billing cycle.”

For this month, customers will be charged an estimated rate based on average usage during the past three months.

The city was notified in January that existing frequencies in the Automatic Meter Reading System would not be available after Dec. 31, according to Arthur. Since then, the department has spent about $500,000 from the utility fund to replace the transmitters and install four new towers across the city to pick up signals from the meters.

With the new system, transmitters send signals to a hot spot on towers and then directly into the office computer servers for real-time data, Arthur said.

“We’ll be able to use the staff elsewhere; we have a lot of work to do and can be proactive in other areas,” he said.

About 20 percent of homes in the city will continue to have their Master Meters read each month by staff. Those meters will likely be updated during phase two of the upgrade, according to Arthur.

In Warren County, staff in the water and sewer department have been replacing transmitters on 8,600 water meters since mid-March, according to Jeff Byrd, water maintenance superintendent for Warren County. Byrd said the FCC needed to free up a number of frequencies to reduce interference with emergency communications.

Byrd said only 8,600 of the county’s 20,000 water meters needed the upgrade — mainly in townships including Deerfield, Symmes, Hamilton and Turtlecreek.

“The new meters have a profile capability where we can extract information from that transmitter for the last 30,000 hours,” Byrd said. “It figures water consumption for every hour.”

Byrd said Warren County’s meters will continue to be read by trucks driving by with a computer receiver inside. He said the county is too rural for the equipment required for a fixed-based system.