We have been using Metron meters for 4+ years and listing the concerns here on Metron Meters.
1.The meters are made of plastic and not durable at all. We have been spending a lot of money getting the bottoms of the meters, top casings and we have to pay for the shipping as well as the material. This is costing us a lot of money.
2. Have talked to 2 owners who manage 1000+ Metron Meters in their parks and they have at least one person full time managing these broken meters, shipping issues,etc. So the cost is just NOT the Metron meters, but a lot lot more!
3. When the meters malfunction like that happened during the recent freeze, we lost thousands of dollars in water, because the meters stopped working and we could not bill the tenants. The replacement casings sent were incorrect sized and further made us lose more money.
4. The whole design of the meters seems flawed as the failure rate is so high!
Frankly, There are a lot if issues and concerns about these water meters that I would like to hear from others as well?
I have Metron also. The top pieces are plastic, the main housing is a composite material with a plastic ‘freeze plate’ inside it. If the heat tape is not wrapped around the base twice it WILL freeze. If it freezes for an extended period it will break the freeze plate and the housing. I had a half dozen meters freeze during this past extreme cold. The biggest weakness I see with mine are the thin plastic register retainer if over tightened [as installers did on some] the register becomes tilted and does not send a read. They are ok meters but far from perfect. Maybe a dealer can address this but I wont hold my breath.
In my first park I too had brass (Badger) water meters before switching to Metron. I can tell you from first-hand experience, it does not make a difference if the meters are plastic, brass or municipal…if the meters are not wrapped properly and even if wrapped properly if the fuse failed in the plug, a breaker tripped out or the resident forgets to plug in or turn on…all meters will freeze.
Having said all that, I am completely sold on Metron. I did not obtain my Metron meters directly from Metron, so I am on a legacy gateway system in multiple parks. We will purchase future Metron meters directly from Metron that use cellular instead of a gateway and Metron’s newest meters also monitor temperature so if a meter is registering colder then all the other meters you will receive an alert so you can investigate the problem before there is meter damage. From what I understand, Metron is not making the cellular meters available to their resellers as that is now Metron’s bread and butter.
Prior to knowing this I had asked our supplier about cellular and they informed me how inferior the cellular meter is to the gateway system. Time will tell as we are currently deploying the new cellular meters in a newly acquired community and if they work as advertised we will be swapping out the guts (at a discount) to our existing communities and eliminate the gateway systems all together.
The biggest selling point for me is the detection of freezing before it occurs.
Hi @DallasMHP We have Metron meters at 4 of our communities. I would rank Metron about a 2 or at best 3 out of 10. The installation process was pretty awful but after several months we finally got to a point where it was mostly working. We decided not to do any more new metron installs and have been using submeter solutions and have been very happy with them so far. I would give them a 9 of 10. They are less expensive and better service. They don’t have all the bells and whistles that the Metron waterscope platform had but thats ok.
QMC Metering Solutions supplies utility grade, brass bodied and highly accurate water meters for outdoor applications. We’ve deployed many water metering systems for manufactured/mobile home parks. The water meter is supplied with an encoded register, which eliminates reading errors related to malfunctioning pulse output registers. The highly accurate solution produces more revenue for the MHP. Please get in touch with me for further information.