Water meters at the South Pender Water Treatment Plant have been inaccurately measuring the flow of water for the past six years.
Infrastructure manager Remko Rosenboom raised the issue during a May 21 infrastructure committee meeting.
A new flow meter was installed at the treatment plant last year.
“Unfortunately we discovered that the other meters … were programmed incorrectly and as a result were underreporting the actual flows,” Rosenboom told directors. “[It’s] very unfortunate,” he said.
The other meters used to measure flow were installed and programmed in 2014, when the plant was built. The contractor that built the plant also installed the meters.
Currently, they have identified flows to be higher by at least 10 per cent. “However we feel that the variation might be bigger with higher flow, so we can only see over the summer what the actual under-recordings of the plant are,” said Rosenboom, who added the miscalculation could effect policy decisions for that system.
He said staff aren’t reprogramming the meters so they can find out how inaccurate the measurements are over the summer.
