History
The origin of our company goes back well over a hundred years. It is a product of a New York meter company, founded in 1870, merging with a Pennsylvania company to form the Pittsburgh Equitable Meter Company. Our story begins when the Rockwell family purchased the company in 1945. “Colonel” Willard F. Rockwell was the engineer who ran the business and it was he who was responsible for moving it to Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
The Rockwell Manufacturing Company Uniontown facility opened in November 1953 to manufacture Arctic, Tropic and Empire positive displacement (disc and piston) meters, Eureka “B” turbine meters and a newly designed single register compound meter. However, the primary reason for the new plant was to build the revolutionary new piston type water meter called the SR (sealed register) meter.
In 1957, after more than $5 million in development and testing costs, the 5/8" size SR meter was put into production. The new meter led the water industry in a new direction over the next two decades. It also made Rockwell #1 in the water meter industry. To date over 40 million SR meters are in service throughout the world.
In the 1960s, the Turbo Meter line of high-performance turbine meters was developed. Remote meter reading came along in the early 1970s; first the generator, then encoders such as the TTR (TeleTape Remote) and in 1984, the TouchRead System with its digital ECR (Electronic Communication Encoder).
The TouchRead system accomplished for meter reading what the SR had done for the meter design; it established a new standard. TouchRead was the first truly reliable, automated system for obtaining accurate meter readings in electronic form, ready for the billing computer.
In 1985, the SRII meter was introduced. This family of new piston type water meters, along with the upgraded electronic encoded registers (ECR II) and state-of-the-art reading capabilities (TouchRead, telephone and radio based AMR) set the stage for the company’s dominant role in technology today.
As Rockwell grew and diversified into a wide array of industries, it combined the water meter business with its gas meter and valve operations in the Measurement and Flow Control Division. This division was sold in 1989 to BTR plc of London. Ten years later the company became known as Invensys Metering Systems. In December 2003, the Resolute Fund L.P, a private equity fund managed by the Jordan Company and GS Capital Partners 2000 L. P, a private equity fund managed by Goldman Sachs & Co. acquired Invensys Metering Systems from Invensys plc. The new international company was named Sensus Metering Systems Inc.
In June of 2006, Sensus acquired the assets of Advanced Metering Data Systems (AMDS). The acquisition enabled Sensus to roll the FlexNet advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system, into Sensus' comprehensive suite of meter reading solutions.
Today Sensus is the world's largest manufacturer of water meters and is an innovator of sophisticated AMR/AMI solutions — including TouchRead, PhonRead, RadioRead and FlexNet, each of which uses the versatile Intelligent Communications Encoder (ICE) for ultimate programming flexibility.