South African metering engineers, since 1994.

Founded to refurbish electromechanical meters

PMT was started by three people from Cullinan Engineering who saw an opportunity in refurbishing electromechanical meters: taking worn instruments and making them accurate again.

Laboratory accreditation

Graeme Mellis joined from Eskom, where he had been senior metering engineer in the Transmission Group. His first task was to have the laboratory accredited by NCS, as SANAS was then called. The laboratory has held that accreditation since 1997, and he is still a named technical signatory on it.

Designing meter test equipment

PMT designed its own meter test equipment: the current and voltage amplifiers, a reference standard, and the software to adjust and calibrate against it. It sold into South Africa, Malaysia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Australia, and was the company's core business for the better part of twenty years. We no longer manufacture test equipment, though we still supply calibration equipment and expertise.

Automatic meter reading by pulse counting

Meters of that generation had almost no communications capability, so PMT built RTUs (remote terminal units) that counted the pulses from the meters. In the same year MOL went into service, the first fully automated meter reading and billing system for a commercial property in South Africa.

Selling the service instead of the system

Selling software and hardware proved unprofitable and support-heavy, because customers did not fully understand what they had bought. PMT therefore stopped selling systems and began selling the service: a web-based system on a monthly subscription, which PMT operated and kept running. Persuading customers that not owning the software was an advantage took a few years.

This was years before anyone had coined the term SaaS.

Communicating with meters over TCP/IP

GSM dial-up gave way to GPRS, but meters could not run a TCP/IP stack (the protocol the internet uses). PMT designed and built modems with a Java virtual machine inside them and, as far as we know, became the first company anywhere in the world to communicate with a meter over TCP/IP. PMT ran its own private APN (a private mobile data network) and its own RADIUS authentication server, because no one offered either as a service at the time.

Smart metering in shopping centres

PMT was the first in South Africa to deploy true smart metering. The customers were shopping centres and commercial buildings rather than utilities, because utilities were reluctant to adopt the technology, and largely still are. This explains the make-up of PMT's customer base since then.

Our own meter range, and NES meters

PMT now designs its own meter range, more closely aligned to South African smart metering regulations. We remain an NES value added reseller and still read many thousands of NES meters, because installed meters remain a source of revenue for their owners after newer products appear.