How the City of South Daytona Ensured the Success of Every Muller Meter Installation with Network Verification
In July 2023, the City of South Daytona, Florida, began deploying Mueller Smart Water meters as part of its infrastructure upgrade efforts. The Fieldman Field Service Management platform was selected to organize all fieldwork—from dispatching work orders to collecting photos of newly installed meters and antennas.
Project: Smart Meter Rollout
Solution: Field Service Management for Smart Meter Deployment
Key Feature: Meter installation verification
Location: City of South Daytona, Florida
56% increase in technician efficiency
100% of meter installations verified
Digital catalog of meters
Smart meter installation verification challenge
From the start, the project was ambitious: South Daytona chose LoRaWAN for its new Mueller Network as a Service (NaaS) AMI system. The meters were designed to be read via a fixed transmitter on the Segrave Street Cell Tower.
LoRaWAN endpoints were key to enabling the city to collect water data remotely and monitor customer usage.
South Daytona is a small, business-friendly community near the Halifax River and the Atlantic Ocean. Once known for its orange groves and vegetable gardens, today the city boasts a variety of attractions and amenities. The plan was to install 5,565 smart meters between 2023 and 2024.
How Fieldman provided the solution
The Fieldman team set up a field service management platform for this project and integrated it with Sentryx Water Intelligence—a digital platform for water utilities to monitor, operate, and optimize water distribution networks. The Fieldman-Sentryx integration enabled immediate meter installation verification, allowing teams to identify and resolve issues right away, rather than waiting for the billing cycle to reveal them.
Mistakes during meter installation are not uncommon. Cables might be improperly connected, antennas could be placed under cast iron lids, which block data transmission, or meters might even be installed backward, leading to negative readings. Fortunately, these issues are immediately flagged during the verification process.
Without smart meter installation verification, data transmission problems may go unnoticed until billing time. If the billing system can't correctly identify and match the meter with the data, it risks generating inaccurate invoices—or none at all.
The Success of South Daytona, Mueller, and Aqua Meter Consultants with Fieldman
Fieldman brought together the entire team involved in the project: Mueller’s technical staff, South Daytona’s billing department, and Aqua Meter Consultants, who were responsible for installation. Real-time search capabilities throughout the project allowed for quick troubleshooting, preventing delays.
The installation verification feature ensured that issues were resolved while technicians were still in the area—not weeks later, after the crew had moved on. "Fieldman gave us real-time visibility into every installation. Problems were fixed right away, with technicians still on-site," says Charles Bowden, President of Aqua Meter Consultants.
By September 2023, technicians had installed the first 3,940 meters. In 2024, over 2,000 more Muller meters were installed during the second phase.
Fieldman also provided all meter data to South Daytona’s billing software, ensuring residents received accurate water bills following the installation of the new Muller meters.
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