Ghana Water Company to read meters with drones

Management of the Ghana Water Company Ltd has introduced an electronic billing system to tackle challenges such as delays in billing, non-billing, non-reflection of bill payments, and difficulty in monitoring meter readers among others.

The Managing Director of Ghana Water Company, Ing. Dr. Clifford Abdallah Braimah, indicated that as part of efforts to improve customer services, GWCL has started a technological drive by introducing a drone metering system for capturing meter readings, catchment monitoring, mapping, among others.

The utility company says the new system will significantly reduce the time between customer meter reading and customer billing, eliminate arm-chair meter reading, effectively reduce human errors inherent in the current billing system, link customer billing to customer location, allow for bill payment anywhere in the world, enable online service connection application and reduce new service connection time.

He then called on National Security to consider the illegal connection of water as a national security threat.

Speaking at the launch under the theme: ‘’Accounting To Our Customers,” Dr. Clifford said when someone does an illegal connection; the person is threatening the lives of Ghanaians.

Ing. Abdallah Braimah, mentioned that the adhesives used to connect the pipes in households should be certified by the FDA Ghana as something friendly to human health, but if customers of Ghana water illegally connect water into their house, they cannot determine the adhesives in the pipes used.

He encouraged the public to report illegal water connections to help reduce the cost of producing potable water.

He also expressed worry over the level of devastation caused by illegal miners on various water bodies stating that the menace of the illegal miners along the water bodies has caused its turbidity to rise above the limit.