By Fay Simmons

Tribune Business Reporter

jsimmons@tribunemedia.net

The Water and Sewerage Corporation (WSC) plans to switch billing its customers to a monthly as opposed to quarterly basis during this 2025 second quarter, it was confirmed yesterday.

Montgomery Miller, its senior manager for strategic co-ordination, said the Corporation has replaced 4,000 mechanical meters with smart meters in New Providence to-date and is aiming to switch out a further 25,000 in the capital and another 10,000 on the Family Islands by the end of 2025.

“The Corporation has 65,000 residential accounts that are currently served by these devices, which is a mechanical meter. Our plan is to replace each and every one of these. We’ve replaced 4,000 of them so far with the smart metering device, which you will see as we continue to roll-out,” said Mr Miller.

“The objective of this plan for 2025 is to replace 25,000 of the mechanical meters in New Providence by the end of 2025, and an additional 10,000 of the same meters in the Family Islands by the end of 2025 with an overall goal at the end of 2026 to complete the project of replacing all 65,000 meters throughout the entire Bahamas.”

Mr Miller explained that the move to smart meters, which will facilitate the monthly billing move, will improve efficiency, ensure greater meter reading accuracy and allow consumers to manage their water usage more effectively.

He explained that a monthly billing cycle will also allow clients to detect leaks on their property in a timely manner by monitoring spikes in their bills instead of receiving a large quarterly bill.

“We are providing our customers with better access to the information you would need to manage your own resources and usage of water. It also supports accurate remote readings. So, ultimately, we will move away from the challenges of locked gates, bad dogs and other issues that prevent us from being able to access customer premises with a remote reading capability,” Mr Miller explained.

“Also, it’s a tremendous benefit to customers with respect to timely leak detection. Coupled with the monthly billing process, the smart metering allows us to gather the information almost instantly in its ultimate installation.

“So, therefore, this issue of high bills as a result of leakage should be a thing of the past. And, finally, there will be an increased trust in our customer billing, and we will eliminate the challenge that we face where customers have very large bills and they’re inexplicable.”

Mr Miller said $16m has been allocated for the transition from mechanical meters to smart meters, but the transition to monthly billing will be an internally generated process that will not require any “significant expenditures”.

He added: “We budgeted $16m for the entire process that is expected to be expended through to the end of 2026. The monthly billing transition is an internally generated process, because it’s really just a change of our process as opposed to significant expenditures.”