Smart Energy Meter Case Study: A 1990s Housing Estate

A municipal utility needed 620 flats in six 1990s blocks moved onto remote reading with a fixed programme and no budget for rewiring. The risers held no spare cable and the blocks are occupied, so a hardwired route was off the table. We supplied single-phase smart meters reporting over a LoRa radio link to a gateway with 4G backhaul. The estate was migrated without opening a single wall.

Project Snapshot

The Problem: No Riser, No Cable, No Outage

Retrofits in occupied blocks are decided by the building, not by the meter. The risers were full, the meter cupboards are on each landing, and running new communication cable would have meant opening ceilings in shared halls and giving residents notice for each block.

The alternative the utility first considered was a rolling programme of manual reading, which keeps the labour cost and the access problem in place indefinitely. It also considered a wired bus between cupboards, which died on the riser audit.

Two constraints then shaped the technical brief. Bills are issued on a monthly cycle, so the utility needed interval data rather than a monthly index. And the estate has two commercial units with three-phase supply at the entrance, which had to be metered on the same platform rather than on a separate system.

Why We Chose a LoRa Gateway With 4G Backhaul Over Wired Bus, a Meter-by-Meter Radio Link and Carrier Broadband

A wired bus between cupboards. Excluded. The riser audit closed it. In an occupied building, the civil work costs more than the meters and takes longer than the programme allows.

A radio module inside every meter reporting individually. Excluded. Six hundred separate subscriptions and six hundred failure points, each with its own signal problem in a concrete stairwell.

Carrier broadband into each block. Excluded. It solves the backhaul and not the local link, so a concentrator would still be needed inside the building.

Meters on a LoRa radio link to one gateway per block, with 4G backhaul from the gateway. Selected. One radio path inside the building, one uplink per block, and one platform for the whole estate.

The Solution We Supplied

The estate runs on single-phase direct-connected meters in the landing cupboards, reporting to a gateway mounted in each block. The gateway reads the meters over a LoRa downlink and sends everything upstream over a 4G link, so the utility's own network stops at the gateway rather than at every meter.

The product used here is our power data gateway terminal, which combines the 4G uplink with a LoRa downlink and local storage, so a short network outage does not lose data. Interval records are held in the meters themselves and collected on the next poll.

The two commercial units at the entrance are on the three-phase electronic energy meter DTS1218, so bills, tariffs and the consumption view all come from one system. Enclosures are IP54 and rated for the temperature range found in an unheated stairwell, which matters in a block where the cupboard faces north.

Installation: How the Work Ran

Meter exchange was planned block by block, landing by landing, with the lift used as the workshop.

Each day covered one block. A two-person team exchanged meters in the morning and ran a live check in the afternoon, comparing a load test against the old meter at the same time. Residents were notified by the building noticeboard and by the utility's own letter, and no supply was interrupted for more than a few minutes per flat.

Gateway mounting came last in each block, once the meters were talking to each other. Radio coverage was checked from the top landing down, and one block needed the gateway moved to a higher cupboard to clear a steel door frame in the path.

Testing and Quality Control

Every meter is calibrated and sealed before dispatch, and the factory test record travels with the batch. The utility's own laboratory spot-checked a sample of meters against its reference before the batch was accepted.

On site, each gateway was verified three ways: meter count, read success rate and timestamp accuracy. The utility also compared a full month of billed consumption against the previous manual reads, which is the check that catches a systematic error rather than a single bad meter.

Results: What the Numbers Show

The estate is now read remotely, and the utility retired the manual round for these six blocks. Roughly 2,400 m of cabling was avoided, along with the resident notifications and ceiling access that the wired option would have required.

The read success rate settled above 99 percent once the gateways were positioned, and the monthly comparison against manual reads matched within the utility's own tolerance. Because the commercial units sit on the same platform, the utility also gained a consumption view it did not have before.

The metering team used the smart energy meter deployment notes from an earlier retrofit to brief its own contractor, and it is now planning the same approach for two further estates.

What This Case Means for Your Project

Retrofits fail on cable routes, not on metering. Once the building says no to new wiring, the architecture has to change to a radio link inside and a single uplink outside.

If you are migrating occupied blocks, campuses or commercial buildings, send us the block layout, the meter count per landing and the read interval you need. We will propose the meter, the gateway position and the uplink, state what has to be installed where, and quote the batch with the test records. Send your site layout to our metering team and we will come back with a per-block plan.