As most of you are aware by now, Ravalli Electric Co-op (REC) is well underway in its implementation of Automatic Meter Reading equipment (AMR). Our plan is to replace all meters on our system with this new technology. Currently, we have deployed about 6,500 new meters and hope to have our entire system completed around the beginning of 2008. We are currently working in the Stevensville and Florence areas with the rest of our system area being completed except for a few specialized meters.

Members should be aware that when a REC employee comes to replace your meter, you will be out of power for a couple of minutes while the replacement is made. Members that may not be home when the meter exchange is made will be informed by a door hangar that will be left at the residence. We will try to keep you advised of the specific areas we are working in by posting information on your utility bill and through radio and newspaper announcements.

This new AMR system allows us to communicate with your meter from our office through our existing power lines. Pretty amazing technology with many future benefits! Only a small part of this system is reading meters. Yes, we can read a meter in two to five seconds from the office, but the other capabilities this system brings to our Co-op are numerous. They include outage monitoring and logging showing not only any outages that your meter records but also the date and length of time of the outage. This will be a huge benefit to REC in troubleshooting problems on our system.

Remote connects and disconnects are also possible with this system by adding an additional module to the meter. We will be testing these for use in remote areas of our system. Today, if you call us and need to have your service disconnected because you are going south for the winter, you may have to wait a couple of days until a serviceman can be scheduled for your area. In the future, we could complete this process from the REC office in a matter of a few seconds.

We can also monitor voltage at any of these meters, again giving us notice of any problems that might exist in your area. Along with recording voltage, we can also setup a meter to record KW (demand) which shows when and how much energy is being used at a location over a certain period of time. This is becoming a very valuable tool for us when we have a member contact us with questions about their energy use. When requested, we can quickly setup your meter to record this information from the office and give you details of your particular usage patterns. See the example on the next page of the REC office building.

We open the office at 8:00 a.m. each workday and you can clearly see by the graph that as employees start arriving in the morning, our usage starts increasing and peaks about 8:00 a.m. for the day. You will also notice our lowest usage during this 24-hour period was at 8:00 p.m. when the building is vacant. This is a great tool in helping you understand your usage patterns and also provides information when troubleshooting a problem.

These are only a few of the capabilities of this system. Of course, with any big project like this, we will encounter problems that need to be worked out, but we are very excited at what this system brings to you and the Co-op.