For the past two days, one of our customers (a power utility) has been attempting to link up reading devices in their meters to our satalite reading system.

Here’s the concept: a device goes in the meter on the side of your house which reads your power consumption. Then, at a designated time (or when triggered by a request), it broadcasts that read via a 2 way satellite pager to our servers in Washington state. We then process that read and provide a billing file to the utility (where ever that may be).

In practice, it gets a lot trickier. There are a lot of things that will interfere with the signal coming/going to the meter.

All the devices they’re working on have had problems in the past, and the meter installers are trying to correct the issue on each meter. This can lead to frustration (because you’re never really sure what the issue might be). It could be something stupid (they didn’t plug the pager module in when it was installed in the meter) or it could be more complex (they need to install an external antenna to get around an obstruction).

Then there’s the variables: A U-Haul truck was parked next to the meter the last time we tried to read it so the read failed. It’s gone now, and it works fine, but next month it’s back again and we fail again. Trees also play havoc with the system. In the winter, everything works fine, but come spring, all those leaves reflect the signal to the point that it’s difficult to get viable data (these aren’t the most powerful transmitters. Sure, we could boost them up, but would you want that on the side of your house?).

So the meter installers keep calling to have me test the devices after they “fix” them. If they fail again, the typical question is “what do I do now?”. Dude… I have no idea. Installing and testing devices is what YOU do for a living…. I’m the software/server guy.

It’s gonna be a long day.