News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The Cookeville Gas Department has faced delays in testing automatic gas readers due to the March tornado and COVID.
Director Jeff Mills said the city is still in the planning stages but wants testing to begin before the year ends.
“So far, everything has run pretty smooth,” Mills said. “We have been pretty methodical as far as trying to get all of our ducks in a row before we start the process. We got some locations identified that we want to use this on and see how it performs for us.”
Mills said the city still needs to order the equipment and install the readers. A mixture of residential, commercial and industrial locations across Cookeville will be the first to receive the upgrades.
“We just got them spread out throughout our system,” Mills said. “So we can logistically test the system, as well as how it is going to perform by being spread out.”
When the new meters are installed, Mills said city employees will continue to manually check the meters, then compare results to the automatic reader.
“Hopefully, if everything goes good and the test performs like we anticipate, we will be ordering more devices and try to deploy those,” Mills said. “We will not do all of them at once. We will schedule it out over a couple year period.”
