City of Maryville Chooses Itron Advanced Water Meter Solutions

LIBERTY LAKE, Wash. — May 11, 2010 — Itron Inc. (NASDAQ: ITRI) announced today that the City of Maryville, Tenn., (Maryville) is deploying Itron's Flostar water meters with integrated meter module, the 80W-i, across its service territory of 13,000 customers. Maryville will also deploy Itron's acoustic leak detection system, MLOG. Maryville received American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding for the project.

After piloting 1,000 Flostar meters in 2008, Maryville discovered improved measurement accuracy, which resulted in increased revenue for the utility. The revenue enhancements and the availability of ARRA funding helped facilitate Maryville's decision to pursue an aggressive meter change-out and leak detection project with Itron.

Maryville City officials stated that they are expecting revenue to be enhanced by swapping out the old meters with the new meters and they will be able to read water meters simultaneously with their electric meters using Itron's mobile collection system.

The Flostar is a single jet water meter that offers unsurpassed accuracy over a wide-range of flows to ensure greater accountability for actual usage. The meter's wire-free integration with the 80W-i meter module provides greater operational efficiency, decreasing read times and costs. The 80W-i module is part of the ChoiceConnect™ meter data collection suite from Itron, and can be read by the utility's meter reading system alongside Itron's CENTRON® electricity meters.

By collecting MLOG acoustic leak data, Maryville will be able to locate and mitigate distribution system leaks while reading its meters. This will reduce water losses and associated costs and help Maryville meet the state's regulations on distribution integrity. The system will now allow Maryville to proactively find distribution leaks with the acoustic technology, instead of being reactive to leaks.

"The City of Maryville was one of our first customers to pilot the Flostar meter. The fact that they are now deploying the meter throughout their system along with the 80W-i meter module speaks to the solution's performance," said Lou Gust, Itron vice president of water sales and marketing. "We're also excited about their decision to deploy our MLOG system to actively control water losses."