15,900+ prepaid ultrasonic water meters, Lagos.

The situation

Lagos Water Corporation set out to replace unmetered and estimated billing across large parts of its distribution network with prepaid ultrasonic metering — a programme that only works if thousands of meters are configured identically, installed correctly and commissioned within a schedule that several contractors are working to at once.

Flant Automations Limited (then trading as Au-Tech Nigeria Limited) served as a key technical contractor across three concurrent packages, working under primary contractors Idmon Engineering & Construction, ThomasChase Nigeria Limited and Oceanic Construction Limited.

What we did

• Meter configuration at volume. 15,911 domestic prepaid ultrasonic meters configured and commissioned into the vending platform — 3,211 on the Idmon package, 8,200 on the ThomasChase package and 4,500 on the Oceanic package.
• Bulk and zonal instrumentation. 65 bulk meters and 6 zonal meters on the Idmon package and a further 45 ultrasonic bulk meters on the ThomasChase package — the district metering layer that makes non-revenue water measurable rather than estimated.
• Field installation and quality assurance. Chamber preparation, meter installation, signal and converter wiring, commissioning and functional verification, with quality control applied across thousands of units rather than sampled.
• Sustained field operations. Mobilising and holding crews across multiple distribution zones for 26 months, on three packages running in parallel.

Why it was difficult

Volume is the obvious challenge, but it is not the hard one. The hard one is consistency: a prepaid metering programme fails commercially if a small percentage of meters are mis-configured, because every one of those becomes a billing dispute, a truck roll and a customer who stops trusting the meter. Working across three separate primary contractors, each with its own schedule and its own site access, meant holding one configuration and commissioning standard across organisational boundaries.

What it demonstrates

Three things a utility client can verify. That we can mobilise and sustain large-scale field operations in a dense urban distribution environment. That we can hold quality assurance across thousands of metering units rather than across a handful. And that we can deliver against demanding schedules on concurrent contract packages without the packages interfering with each other.