Starting this year, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District is doing a huge meter retrofit. They’re replacing the old meters with so-called “drive-by” meters.

"They’re meters that electronically transmit the meter reads to a device within the meter reader vehicles so that we don’t have to access customer’s yards or walk by their house every month."

SMUD’s Eric Krause says by using the “drive-by” technology they can read more than 2,500 meters in an hour – something that takes 4-days to do now. The initial cost of the new meters is $43 million but utility officials say that’ll be paid back over the next several years because of lower operational costs.