Failing water meters will cost Toronto millions to fix: report

It will take $5.6 million to start fixing Toronto’s cascade of failing water meters, according to a new city staff report.
And that’s only the fee to get the ball rolling on “initial replacements.” It is not yet known how high the bill will get to fix all 470,000 faulty meters in Toronto.
In July, Mayor Olivia Chow revealed that batteries in water meters’ transmission units across the city were dying years before the expected end of their life cycles. They should have lasted until around 2030 or 2035, she said. 
When the units failed, thousands of residents got hit with huge bills out of nowhere, while others stopped getting invoices all together.
City staff are now asking council for permission to continue negotiations with the manufacturer of the meter transmission units, Aclara Technologies, to settle on a fee to replace the rest of the units. This request will be first considered at the city’s infrastructure and environment committee Tuesday.
Brokering this replacement deal with Aclara was a matter of “extreme urgency,” staff said, noting the transmission units are breaking at a “far greater rate than expected.”
As more batteries fail, more Torontonians will be reverted back to estimated water billing. That’s the system that was in place before 2010, which the city sought to end by installing the transmitters.
The faulty transmission units are still under warranty, which the city said has kept replacement costs down somewhat. The $5.6-million figure is an “agreed pro-rata warranty replacement cost,” staff said. The replacement fee Aclara is charging the city varies depending on the age of the units at time of failure.
The faulty batteries in the units were installed nine to 14 years ago and are breaking roughly in order from oldest to newest. Carlo Casale, manager of the water meter replacement program, told the Star in 2012 the batteries were designed to last 20 years.
Since 2019, the city has been paying Aclara more than $1.2 million per year to supply, maintain and upgrade the transmission units.
A report from the same year calculated that this annual investment in Aclara was needed because if the transmission units failed and the city had to resort to manual meter readings it would cost Toronto $5 million in increased operating costs annually.
Aclara Technologies did not return a request for comment from the Star.
The transmission units didn’t just convey water usage. They also informed the city of leaks, pipe breaks and open hydrants, allowing it to deal with water loss more expediently, thereby saving money.
Financial benefits of this for the city were estimated at $32.8 million per year in 2015.