Remote Meter Reading Spans Shenzhen and Frees Nearly 1,000 Meter Readers

Shenzhen - "Now when there are more residents in the community, so too will be the high demand for electricity. If a transformer is installed, it can eliminate the hidden dangers and facilitate the users," explained Zhong Liyue, a member of the electricity inspection class of the Longhua Power Supply Bureau of Shenzhen.
Mr. Zhong came to the Longtang New Village to conduct a series of routine inspections. Knowing that the transformer was often overloaded, he patiently explained the reasons for this to the local community staff.
Although Zhong Liyue easily shares his thoughts about electricity safety problems and solutions, he was not so good at it a few short years ago.
Since Year 1998, Mr. Zhong had been working as a meter reader and has a solid 20 years under his belt for the Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau when, at the time, implemented a concentrated low-voltage meter reading, making true remote automatic meter reading a necessity. As a result, nearly 1,000 meter readers like Zhong Liyue had to be transferred to Shenzhen.
Meter readers simply cannot make a mistake when reading and recording. In the peak seasons, they may have to walk 20 or 30 kilometers a day. Hard as it is, it takes half of their business time just to get to the job site so it is not easy to transfer to a different field.
After more than half a year of training, Mr. Zhong successfully obtained a certificate of electricity inspection license for senior worker and senior operators, finding his position again.
According to the Meterage Department of the Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau, in the past, the more than three million power meters in the city were divided into two groups, each being read alternatively every month. Even working from dawn to dusk  it took about 20 days for more than 1,000 readers to complete the monthly task of reading every individual meter and issuing electricity bills as they had to visit each and every household without fail!
But today, Shenzhen has built a power data collection system that spans the whole city, which can read the meter data of each household, remotely every day, which greatly improves the quality and efficiency of meter reading.
Concurrently, the system can also read the load data and detect abnormal power consumption.
At present, more than 99.8% of the meters in Shenzhen are successfully read. Among the more than 1,000 former meter readers, some were transferred to customer service postings, some to electricity inspection, some to site operation and maintenance posts and others to management positions at the community level.