SAN ANTONIO – Your home is about to get a little smarter when it comes to monitoring how much energy you use.
Over the next four years CPS Energy will replace more than 1 million electric and gas meters in Bexar County.
The utility said it's spending $290 million to upgrade the old meters to smart meters.
CPS Energy workers were testing the latest shipment of smart meters Wednesday that will soon take the place of 740,000 analog meters.
According to Dwain Duke, director of system measurements and technology, the smart meters are more accurate and have built-in communications capabilities that should help speed up repairs when the lights go out.
"The meter will send a (signal) back to our operations center, so that will allow us to better locate the fault or the outage and respond to that outage," Duke said.
Once crews respond and repair the outage, the meters can let them know if any other problems still exist.
"We'll send a ping to the meters to make sure everybody is restored," Duke said. "So if the Duke household has not been restored, another outage is created while the folks are on-site and it gets responded to in a faster mode."
The new meters will also make manual meter reading obsolete and help customers keep better track of their energy consumption with a special web portal.
"As an individual customer you can look at your hourly usage and make adjustments as you see fit," Duke said.
As part of the switch-out program, 340,000 gas meters are also getting an upgrade that should make billing more accurate.
The gas meters will be able to communicate with the electric meters to track consumption.
"The module actually communicates with the electric meter, once a day at midnight, to let the electric meter know how much consumption was actually seen in this gas meter," said CPS gas director Jacob De Leon.
CPS said it tests 10 percent of every shipment. If any of the meters fail, the entire shipment is rejected.
"They test these meters for accuracy, making sure the energy consumption demand is accurate that they communicate, so that when we put them on a residence or business that they can be trusted," De Leon.
CPS Energy said 40,000 smart meters have already been installed as part of a 2011 pilot program.
The utility is recycling all of the old meters and expects to have the upgrade complete by 2018.