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A note from our founder.  A copy of the speech prepared for the September AMRA show.

If you are married and have children...if you have watched them grow and mature...then you know the pride that comes from that experience....The PRIDE in knowing that you helped with both the production and the maturing experience....and that's exactly how I personally feel when I see the growth of my personal conception of an electronic meter that could be remotely accessed and read automatically....one that could provide MORE and better information so that the consumer and the utility could both benefit..a meter that could provide conservation....

I must confess that my idea for the electronic meter came out of the electronic meter came out of the frustration and angst I experienced, on an almost daily basis, reading and resetting hundreds of demand meters, located in dozens of office and manufacturing buildings, throughout the New York City area, when I worked as a meter reader for a submetering company in the 70's....

I envisioned sitting in an air conditioned office, dialing up the meters, bringing the information to me, creating the billing, delivering the bills, collecting and chuckling all the way to the bank.....

Part of it came through when I put together a team in 1979 and disclosed what I wanted to build...and the "baby" was born.  By the end of the year we had a working operative prototype and simple software.  A couple of months later I had  wire-wrapped operative samples installed in my 47 story office building...up on line...metering...REMOTE ELECTRONIC ELECTRIC METERING WAS BORN...and electric metering was changed forever!!!!

The first electronic meter was very crude and unsophisticated....no on-board microprocessor, no on-board memory...in fact there was nothing on-board except a V-F converter....All 254 "meters" were hard wired to an on-site computer which scanned all the meters once per minute, added the 60 readings of the past hour, then divided by sixty...The resulting number was the total KWH used during the last hour, which was then held in memory and added to the next hourly-total reading and so on for the monthly 30day total KWH....

Surprisingly it was highly accurate, worked perfectly well, and as a matter of fact, some of these original metering systems are still in operation in and around the metropolitan New York area, almost twenty five years later.

CMC subsequently built it's own computers, design and built the computer scanning and metering boards from scratch...and did things the hard way for years, until components became more available, smaller and the price came down.  During the past 20 odd years CMC has continued to redesign, upgrade, and advance the electronic meter and remote reading metering meter, and systems to the advanced stage it is in now.

I am constantly amazed at the giant strides the electronic metering manufacturing industry has made with the new metering/measuring chips supplied by the major manufacturers.

The accuracy alone in mind-boggling...not to mention the allied information i.e.: demand, power quality, usage memory, peak demand, time of day rates, remote connect and disconnect, meter conditions, weather conditions, automatic call out, automatic reporting and on and on and on....mind-boggling as I said.  And the best is yet to come...prepayment cards, auto payment with the press of a single button, usage information, appliance operating costs, house "sitting" gateway for Smart Houses..etc.

Year after year I can't wait to attend various shows, like the AMRA show, to see and show the newest in metering i.e.: ideas and advancements in meter info acquisition by radio, paging systems, phone, cell phone, satellite, web, computer etc....and I still get little goose bumps on the back of my neck when I remember conceptualizing the meter, building the prototype in my basement, installing the wire-wrapped meters and getting the first info down the data cable to my office teletype machine which was then linked to a DEC PDP8, which we used to create the operating program, access the meters and download the info from our computer of the time..(which by the way still resides in my basement...).

AMR is being adopted rather slowly by the utilities...their explanation is the cost of the meters.....They hearken back to the glass enclosed electro mechanical meter they have been buying for many years for $35.00.  they still can't understand why electronic meters cannot be produced, and sold, for the same price ($35.00) and still contain a microprocessor, memory, LCD modem etc....and be much more accurate than electronic mechanical meters, and include the additional features and information they now demand and require...and be upgradable infinitely...

The price of electronic meters have been falling rapidly while the functions have been rising rapidly, along with the necessity by the utilities to install them due to new tariffs.  The coming tariffs and the instant problems of power distribution (and the failure of certain ESCOs)..mandates the immediate need for remote electronic metering, every single day that passes..

Meter manufacturers are ready, willing and able to produce what the industry wants and needs, but we can't produce it and then not have buyers, for decent quantities, in order to pay for design, development, manufacturing, advertising, sales and service...

Any way you look at it...the remote reading electronic meter is here to stay, and I am personally happy that I personally had a great part in it's invention, design, production and international growth. Computer Metering Corporation was the FIRST, in 1980..is one of the best and is still one of the most innovative of all the electronic meter manufacturing companies...and I am rightly proud of that....

CMMC Serves as a Representative on
New York State Public Service Commission
Working Groups

CMMC is the ONLY metering company in New York State sitting on various committees involving the deregulation of electric power at the New York State Public Service Commission in Albany, NY.  As these proceedings progress, we will keep you up-to-date on important proposals and rulings.

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Copyright May 2004 Computerized Meter Manufacturing Corp.  All rights reserved.